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12/24 |
2005/2/26-28 [Computer/SW/Apps/Media, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:36440 Activity:nil |
2/26 I just ripped some stuff off of a supposedly copy protected VCD from China or Hong Kong (I didn't care about the content, but I was curious about the protection) using Alcohol and DVDGear. I could not see the mpeg streams from either the VCD or the ripped image from my PC unless I did that. First, what is DVDGear reading to get the mpeg stream out? Are the physical tracks the actual stream with no filesystem? Second, the ripped mpegs correspond one to each track, there are a total of 8 tracks. I can play the first track with any software player like Windows Media Player. However, I cannot play the other tracks. The only way to view the other tracks is through a program called Nero Media Player. Is there missing header information on the subsequent tracks which chokes all the other players and Nero Media Player just ignores this? How would I fix this? I assume that this method of encoding a VCD is to prevent casual people from being able to play the VCD on their computers and be able to just rip the disk by doing a simple file copy. \_ The .dat files on a VCD are basically just MPEG1 streams. Just copy them. |
2005/2/26-3/1 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:36437 Activity:kinda low |
2/26 What hard drives do you recommend? To stay away? Reliability is top priority. \_ regardless of brand, I've found a strong correlation between HDs that fail with enclosures that don't have good airflow. I've had 3 consecutive WD-200 Caviar failures in 6 months on this particular computer while the same WD-200 Caviar didn't fail on any of my other computers. It turns out that the airflow sucks and the HD gets really really hot, to more than 130F. Nowadays I use special HD fans in conjunction with good filtered in and out fans that bring down the temperature to 80-90F. It's been 1 years since I did that and I haven't had any failure. \_ If reliability is top priority, then SCSI-Anybody. The SCSI discs are aimed at business users and are built to much higher standards and typically come with a 5yr warranty vs. 1 year on consumer-level ATA drives. \_ SCSI is on its way out. Get SATA with a 3 year warranty. Western Digital and Seagate seem to be high quality. \_ Seconded. If you really care about reliability then you should go with SCSI (either u160 or u320) drives. If you are unwilling (or unable) to pay the SCSI reliability premium, SATA drives from either WD or Seagate are not bad. Like the poster below says stay away from Maxtor. \_ If reliability is top priority use RAID and keep backups. Stay away from Maxtor drives. \_ In all my years of dealing with hardware, I've found that no one drive manufacturer is consistently reliable. I would have to say that Maxtors do have a perceived reliability problem, but I've only had one maxtor about to fail and one which is somewhat unreliable, they did replace one within a reasonable amount of time. The worst drive failure I've had so far was an IBM, and it was out of warranty by less than a year. I've had Seagate fail on me also, but those were old seagates from Ultra10s, which are known to have used cheapie parts. \_ I had a Hitachi (formerly IBM's disk division) drive fail within the warranty period. I have a few acquaintances who had IBM drive failures. My ancient Maxtor's still ticking. -- ilyas \_ I had a Hitachi that was DOA, then its replacement (shipped from factory) was also DOA, and then another, and finally another. That was all one incident. I vowed to never again buy a Hitachi. As for perceived reliability, I've had mixed experiences over the years. Maxtor and WD have been *equally* reliable in that I think I've only RMA'd one or two of each in the 50+ hard drives I've owned. I had one IBM deathstar which did exactly what its name promised. I figure that the internals are all come from the same place, so as said below, buy for warranty. Always assume that the drive will fail and that you'll have to replace it. Since *all* PATA drives are being knocked down to 1 year warranties now, I just watch the deal sites and buy the cheap and big maxtor or wd drive of the week. - jvarga \_ actually, on the contrary, all seagate drives now come with a 5 year warranty. there are still other drives out there with at least a 3 year warranty. \_ how the hell do you own 50+ hard drives? Are you a sysadm or an avid porn DVD collector? \_ 50 hard drives over my geek lifetime. My current main system has 5, my server 3. 160GB hard drives are also cheap enough as to where I can buy one, back up everything to it, then just go stick it in my fire safe. I currently have 2 or 3 160's just sitting in my safe. - jvarga \_ Where do you put your safe? \_ The safe is under the right side of my bed. The combination is 26-36-15. I go to work at 9am and do not come back home until 6pm. The alarm code is 23049. The front door key is under the hollow rock to the left of my front door. Why do you ask? - jvarga \_ Heh, that's amusing. -mice \_ "Egad Brain, what are we gonnna do tonight? Same thing we do every night, Pinky. Try to take over the world." \_ finger pinky \_ finger brain \_ finger mice \_ Truthfully, in terms of reliability it does not matter. They are all very close. IBM, Fujitsu, Seagate, or whatever. It doesn't matter. Buy for warranty and performance. I prefer SCSI drives for performance, but they don't seem to last any longer (in fact, less long - probably because of heat with the higher RPMs). \_ Well put! \_ Strangely, my impression is much different. In terms of mainstream IDE drives with at least three years of warranty: Hitachi > Western Digital > Maxtor, Samsung, Seagate In terms of notebook drives: Hitachi >> everyone else. In terms of IDE drives with 1 year warranty, you got me, since I don't buy those. \_ I've had 2 Hitachi (IBM) notebooks drives die on me relatively quickly, replaced with Seagate. Quantum drives died pretty fast as well. I noticed most high end stuff uses Seagate, that's my current brand of choice. |
2005/2/21-22 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:36358 Activity:nil |
2/21 Are the magnets in a hard disk drive (the ones in the servo basse) strong enough to erase the data on the platters if the patters are removed and the magnets slid in contact with the platter surface? I was surprised how strong those magnets are! \_ I believe anything's possible. Too bad I don't have a spare HD to test this with. Magnetic field can't be shielded so I wonder how easy it is to erase your nemesis' computer by waving a strong magnet around his/her laptop. |
2005/2/21-22 [Computer/Networking, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:36347 Activity:high |
2/21 Does anyone have good recommendations for an external USB hard drive enclosure? \_ Maxtor OneTouch. I really like mine. -John \_ They're pretty much all the same. \_ Thanks. Does this one seem pretty typical: http://tinyurl.com/4xokj \_ Not really. It's USB and 1394. USB only runs about $20. Looks like this one has a proprietary power cable (I like my USB 2.0 enclousure that uses a standard ATX power cable). Looks pretty similar to my USB+1394 enclosure though. \_ I would go to http://newegg.com, click on Shop by Category, External Enclosure, select the parameters you want on the left (USB Yes, Size 3.5 for desktop HD, 2.5 for notebook HD, or 5.25 for optical drive) and Search, sort by Best Rating, and then pick one near the top which has only one cable for power (none of this power brick crap with one cable drive->power brick and another cable power brick -> wall), kind of like this: http://csua.org/u/b4x ($38, AMS 3.5" USB 2.0 only) The other category of external drives is backup for your pointy- haired boss on the ThinkPad or relatives. In this case I would go Western Digital, the two-option backup version (see their web site), but I'm still trying to figure out how to do encryption with (bundled) Retrospect Express. \_ Search for the "Metal Gear" enclosure-- they're not the cheapest, but simple, fanless, support firewire and USB, and they're pretty high quality-- the entire aluminum case acts as a heatsink, so it's very quiet but won't toast your drive(s). I think I paid $40. \_ fyi, I'm the guy recommending AMS above, and I was also the guy that recommended the Metal Gear enclosure on soda half a year ago. The Metal Gear uses the 2 cable power-brick thing. ago. The Metal Gear uses the 2 cable + power brick thing. See the photo on http://newegg.com: http://csua.org/u/b4z Anyways, a couple of the AMS comments talk about how the design is better than the Metal Gear's, although it is not as flashy. |
2005/2/8-9 [Computer/SW/OS/Windows, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:36099 Activity:kinda low |
2/8 I would like to destroy/wipe the data in a particular directory of a portable linux computer without wiping the whole disk. Any suggestions for how to do this easily? \_ rm. If you are worried aboyt someone undeleting and discovering your porno collection you can write a script and overwrite each file with /dev/zero bits. \_ any experience with "wipe"? http://abaababa.ouvaton.org/wipe \_ When you write data to a linux file, does it write the data to new sectors, or does it overwirte the original data in the same sectors? \_ Overwriting with 0 isn't good enough. /dev/random might be better, but still isn't good enough. \_ If you are very concerned about getting rid of it, some definitions of "military" grade wipe specify something like 19 overwrites with as-random-as-possible 010101 strings. Forensics outfits like Kroll and Guidance (and even commercial SW like EnCase) can do some pretty unlikely data recovery. The only way to reliably completely destroy drive contents is to physically shred the disk after multiple sequential white noise overwrites. -John \_ dropping it from Empire State Building is the best \_ rm -P This won't actually do the job (see http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/source/sdelete.shtml for a windows utility that will do the job--source available) but it's better than nothing. (Oops, I have no idea if that option is available on linux.) \_ The rm manpage recommends "shred". Anybody know if shread would work on ext3 with data=journal mode? \_ It should. If in doubt, mount the partition as ext2, run shred, unmount and remount as ext3. |
2005/2/3-5 [Computer/HW/Memory, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:36055 Activity:moderate |
2/3 So, I'm really confused about this notion of computer science metrics where everything's kind of 2^n, but sometimes not. For example, if I have a 4 GIG hard drive, does that mean I have exactly 2^32 bytes of space? Does that translate to 4000000000 bytes, or some number that's close to it? How about megahertz? Say I have a 2.5GHz computer, does it run at exactly 2500000 hertz? Or 2^n for some multiple of n? \_ As a few other people have said, just about everything is ordinary decimal units now. A 4G hard drive is (about) 4,000,000,000 bytes, and a 2.5GHz processor runs at (about) 2,500,000,000 Hertz. Operating systems still tend to report file sizes in binary units, though, so a 4G file is probably 4,294,967,296 bytes. (Sometimes it's configurable: GNU du and df let you specify -h for binary units or -H for decimal.) The only hardware still sold in binary units is memory -- a 1G flash memory card is 1,073,741,824 bytes. Also note that all storage devices are sold by raw capacity, not counting filesystem overhead. \_ I'd actually argue that in computers, all standards and measurements are 10^n with the exception of RAM and addresses. HDDs, bandwidth, frequency, resolution (megapixels) are all base ten. \_ The ISO standard (IIRC) is Gibibytes for 2^30 and Gigabytes for 10^9. Memory is addressed by logic which is friendly to powers of 2. Non-memory doesn't matter. \_ Frequencies (Hertz) are not stated in powers of two obviously. You can usually find the exact frequency in the tech specs. Computer data quantities are normally referred to with binary prefixes (kilo=1024). Hard drive producers use 1000 because they are fuckers. A frequency is not a data quantity. \_ The whole k=1024 thing was a cute hack invented by computer folks, but it becomes imcreasingly strained as you move into mega- and giga- prefixes. At some point you need to admit it's more trouble than it's worth. The computer should be the one worrying how to address it's memory in base-2, rather than the end user wondering how many bytes are in a gig. \_ Memory is sized in 2^n because that's how the chips are laid out. The capacity of a hard drive is determined by the track width and magnetic domain size. This gives you a non-binary capacity. It makes sense to therefore measure it using the SI system. The fact that CS people started calling 1024 and 1048576 kilo- and mega- when those prefixes had been in use for ages says to me that the CS people are the fuckers, not the engineers who are just adhereing to standard terminology. I personally count all file and data sizes in base-10, except when refering to memory usage. Anyway, this debate has been done to death before. \_ so 1M is what really? 1000000 or 10^20? \_ Officially, 10^6 (you mean 2^20, right?). M = 10^6, Mi = 2^20 See: http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html \_ No, it doesn't make sense when you're talking about computer storage capacity to use a different meaning of GB than everybody normally uses when talking about computer storage. It's not like the drives are storing non-binary data. It's going to have a filesystem and store vanilla kilobytes and megabytes. Nowhere else does Gbyte refer to 1000*1000*1000. In a computer environment, files are loaded into memory and to disk, it's idiotic to change the terminology just because the underlying media is different. CD and DVD storage is referred to in binary. Sorry, you're wrong. \_ FWIW, floppies are counted under a bastardized hybrid system where 1.44 'megabytes' = 1440 KiB, or 1.44k-KiB \_ No. CDs and DVDs are counted base-10, as is bandwidth. The fact that the drives are storing binary data has no bearing on the method you use to count the bytes, which this debate shows, is a matter of dueling conventions, not some underlying fact. I'm not wrong, you're just an ass. \_ The orange book standard says a cd has a capacity of 650*2^20 bytes. \_ A DVD+-R(W) is 4.7*10^9 \_ Hard to argue, since they charge $5,000 for a copy of a DVD format spec ($500 for each additional spec) and require an NDA. Do you actually have access to the four specs you mention? The holder of DVD Forum's specs is http://www.dvdfllc.co.jp |
2005/2/2 [Computer/HW, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:36037 Activity:nil |
2/2 I have a 7 year old PC (with display) that I'd like to get rid of. Can I just dump it outside of my house and expect it to be picked up by the Berkeley garbage service? \_ http://www.otxwest.org \_ No, it is hazardous waste. Take it here: http://www.accrc.org |
2005/2/2-3 [Computer/HW, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:36030 Activity:low |
2/2 What are the differences and pros/cons of POP3 vs. IMAP? I'm asking both on the admin side and for the end-user. \_ Hm the nuker strikes again. IMAP is good because it lets you see mails from several clients (including via CLI and web mail.) If you're going to do imap, I recommend Dovecot/imaps + Postfix with TLS and SMTP AUTH. I also run an openwebmail server over SSL, the whole combo works a charm. -John \_ The most irritating aspect of POP3 is when you are migrating someone to another computer, and their new workstation downloads 5,000 duplicate e-mails that weren't deleted from the mail server yet -- and each duplicate e-mail is re-filtered into separate folders in their e-mail client. \_ IMAP uses more disk space on the server, and pop is a pain for the end-user-side if they have more than one computer. POP is good if the user has one computer. overall IMAP is nice. \_ How much more? One file per message vs. one file per user, or multiple copies of each message? Are we talking 5% or 200%? \_ The number of messages per file varies depending on the implementation, but with IMAP, mail stays on the server, so that is a whole lot more disk space if you user keeps a lot of mail, and the storage grows over time. I don't think any sane email system would keep "multiple copies of each message". http://www.google.com/search?q=pop+versus+imap \_ Disk size doubles every 12 (or is it 18 month). Not using IMAP because (shock and horror) users will store mail on the server (kind of the point, now isn't it) is a) insane and b) means you need don't understand exponentials and should probably get out of this computery business... \_ IMAP is great if you have mail clients that do reasonable caching of messages after downloading them. It also allows you to run a concurrent webmail service without problems. I recommend trying dovecot imaps. -John \_ The really sad thing is that IMAP as a protocol is a superset of POP3. You can make IMAP act just like POP3 if you want. In practice, people seem to write IMAP clients to tend to leave mail on the server and POP3 to tend to download it all every time. \_ POP3 is fucking deprecated. Don't use it anymore. The main (only?) benefit of POP3 is that it allows lazy fucking admins to do less set up and (short term) maintenance. The main problem with IMAP is that because lazy fucking admins kept using POP3 the immature, poor IMAP servers and clients haven't died the painful death at the hands of the market they deserve. If you're going to run an open-source IMAP server, run Cyrus. Courier and UW-IMAP both suck hard if you throw a large number of users or a handful of users with large mailboxes at them. If you want a good tool to extract messages from the clutches of your existing mailserver and transfer them via imap commands to your shiny new mailserver, dig up the uw-mailutils utility(ies?) which are part of the UW-IMAP package or available alone in debian (apt-get install uw-mailutils). |
12/24 |
2005/2/2-3 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:36025 Activity:nil |
2/1 <nevermind, i found: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dishrip \_ If you do this, the easiest way I've found is to open the box, yank the IDE and power cables from the motherboard side (leave the HD in the cage), and plug them into an external drive enclosure. You'll need to make a molex gender changer (unless you can find one somewhere) -- remember to match colors. |
2005/1/28-29 [Finance/Banking, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35954 Activity:moderate |
1/28 Anyone have any creative ideas for things to do with old CDs? Does campus recycle them? \_ create art. Make CD mail armor. \_ This is the most brilliant goddamn thing I've seen all week. You just defined my purpose in life. \_ Use a lot of duct tape on the backside so the splinters from the cracked CDs don't get jammed into your skin. \_ true, good for reflecting lasers, at least... |
2005/1/28-29 [Computer/HW/CPU, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35949 Activity:low |
1/28 I'm thinking of building a cluster of diskless, low-end low-noise PCs (one to attach a monitor to a wall to make it look like a moving painting, one in the kitchen to display weather/traffice), are there motherboards that boot up from LAN and without having to have a HD? \_ Try Mini-ITX from VIA. Many of them are fanless. AFAIK, all of them have the ability to boot off the net. \_ Also just to get some ideas, look at http://www.mini-itx.com . They're in the UK, so ordering may abe problematic, but their page has some cool resources. -John \_ You can get the same shit here in the U.S. Just go down to Central Computer if you're in the Bay Area. They'll either have it or get it for you. \_ how about 802.11? Any board that can boot from that? \_ I don't think so. |
2005/1/24 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35868 Activity:kinda low |
1/23 Recommendation for free software that will take DVD as input and generate an mpeg,avi,wmv,etc file from it. I'm not looking for fancy stuff. I really just want something that is like "ripping DVDs for dummies" as I'm not a pc hacker guy. Is there such a free tool? If not, what for-profit sw is out there to do this. I need something that works, nothing fancy. Thanks. \_ PIRATE! PIRATE! Somebody call the MPAA! \_ DVD Decrypter will rip it to your HD. DVD Shrink will fit it onto one DVD+R. Both are excellent freeware programs. |
2005/1/23-24 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35864 Activity:kinda low |
1/23 If I were to put a small 12V 2-3" fan nearby my hot HD, is it better to blow on the top silver side, or is it better to blow on the lower bottom (motor) side? My HD is really really really hot and I'm afraid it might break down if I don't do anything about it. \_ Heat rises. Blow on the top side. That's what Yermom told me. \_ So Hismom told you to start blowing? \_ Heat rises. Blow on the top side. |
2005/1/21-24 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35844 Activity:moderate |
1/21 Some PC hardware questions, any advice much appreciated: 1) Anyone have experience with Maxtor Diamond 250GB SATA drives? 2) I read once that it's not smart to buy all drives in a RAID array from the same mfgr/vendor (batch). Is this still the case? \_ What a bunch of rubbish. You are MORE likely to run into problems when mixing different drives which are more likely to have different disk geometries and other parameters. Not all controllers can deal with this well. 3) On a RAID controller (in this case a 3Ware 9500-S) does the # of ports refer to how many drives can be attached, or does it have something to do with data transfer channels? http://3ware.com is a bit vague on this. Thanks for any clarifications! \_ I've been hearing bad things about the reliability of 250MB+ drives. Also, I hate maxtor drives because they all get noisy within a year or two. \_ Thanks. Any drive model recommendations for SATA 200-250GB? \_ 8 port means 8 drives. You may want to look into hitachi 300GB drives. They're supposedly more stable compared to WD and Maxtor 250GB drives. \_ Don't by CRASHtor drives unless you hate your data and love sending your drives in for RMA. I have had several 120GB drives and 250GB drives made by Maxtor die w/in six months of buying them. I switched to WD and Seagate and haven't had any problems with either. \_ Thanks for all your comments, it's nice to get 1st-person opinions. This is a great help. \_ I've had a maxtor drive that's worked for over 6 years now. I have a 120GB maxtor that's been working fine for over a year. YMMV, in many cases it's just the luck of the draw. |
2005/1/20 [Science/Electric, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35809 Activity:moderate Edit_by:auto |
1/20 So how much power does my P4 with 350w PS consume? 350w or less? I am trying to figure out how much electricity I am wasting... \_ Less than 350W, plus your monitor and any powered peripherals. If you really care, you can buy a device called 'kill-a-watt' which can tell you the usage of anything that plugs in. \_ My Athlon 64 3200+ Newcastle (0.13um) with 450W power supply uses 70 watts at idle, around 120 at load. \_ Thanks! \_ oh yeah, it's probably like 25-50 more (I forget) when I'm also playing a 3D game. \_ Is this measurement through "Kill A Watt"? \_ Yes. You can also buy a Seasonic version (just search for that) on http://newegg.com for $35. I think they're both accurate. FYI, ThermalTake has an ATX power supply that gives you a front-panel LED of wattage, but it underestimates by ~ 20%. That's the non-PFC version at least. Lameness. Someone else said the ThermalTake was accurate, but it's very likely to be the PFC version. \_ Thanks! \_ I don't know the answer. Just tell it to turn off your monitor and hard disk after X minutes of idle time. And put the PC to hibernate and switch off the monitor when you leave your office. \_ http://www.pcworld.com/howto/article/0,aid,109379,pg,2,00.asp Calculating PC wattage |
2005/1/18 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35776 Activity:nil |
1/18 This seems kind of odd. http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=656377 26.5 million pounds... they call it a "raid" but it sounds like it was two guys carrying money out in boxes? |
2005/1/18-19 [Finance/Banking, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35762 Activity:moderate |
1/18 A bunch of CD-ROMS I have are corrupted. They're in a nice CaseLogic case, closed, stored in a temperate (70-85F), dry location. I have no idea why they're corrupted, but I know one thing-- they've been sitting close my Sharper Image Ionizer [plus UV mode turned on], for maybe 6 months. I'm suspecting that either the ions or the UV killed them, but is it actually possible with the CD case closed? How about ions, are they bad for electronics, etc? ok thx. \_ Nah, most likely you got a bad batch of CD-Rs. Some CD-Rs were just badly manufactured and the dye just broke down. I'm assuming these are CD-Rs and not regular CDs. If they are regular CDs then there's something wrong with your drive, assuming that the CDs aren't melted or something. Otherwise, pressed CDs are very sturdy. \_ I thought about that, but both of my Memorex and Maxell batch are dead. And the weird thing is that initially the disk read were alright till maybe the last 10% of the files, which end up to be corrupted. So I think maybe one side of the CD got exposed to something harmful, but I don't know... \_ How old are they? CDs are known to "go bad" after 7-10 years. \_ I made them since 2000-2001. Never really subjected them to sunlight or extreme heat. Must be the UV+ionizer -op \_ the data is written from the middle outward, so your experience of the "last 10%" failing first indicates that the seal on the outer rim failed and the dye layer degraded from the outside towards the middle. do you see any funny patterns on the data side, e.g. corrosion or weird non-concentric variations? i too would blame the ionizer. |
2005/1/18-19 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35761 Activity:kinda low |
1/18 Western Digital vs. Maxtor, round one. I have 2 drives, a Maxtor 250G and a WD 200G. Both have been running for a while since this summer, and out of curiousity I checked out their warranties. WD has a 3 year warranty while Maxtor only has a 1 year warranty. Is there anything I can conclude about the reliability, availability, and serviceability of the two drives? \_ Most manufacturers switched to 1 year warranty on most of their ATA drives last year. WD kept the 3yr warranty on their 8MB cache models. So I doubt you can make any assumptions based on the warranty period. But there appears to be a big difference in reliability between 200GB and 250GB drives that's common on pretty much all of the manufacturers, which 300GB drives failing more than any others. Based on that, I'd say your Maxtor 250GB would be more likely to prematurely fail. I also had to replace 2 Maxtor 250GB drives in one of our ATA raid systems just last week, whereas I've yet to replace any of the drives on the same ATA raid system that has WD drives. But the WD one is newer, so nothing can be concluded from that either. \_ All drives fail it's a matter of luck. Ive had all types. IBM Seagate, Maxtor, WD, Hitachi, etc.. I would suggest going with the manufacturer that has the best warranty. that's why I've stuck to only Seagate drives now since they have 5yr warranty. \_ As the former owner of 3 Maxtor drives (2 120 GB and 1 250 GB) drive, my experience was that Maxtor had really poor reliability and frequently failed before the 1 yr warranty was up. I switched to WD and Seagate and haven't noticed any problems to date (1yr +). |
2005/1/18 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35759 Activity:nil |
1/17 Thank to all the people trying to help me configure ATA133. I fixed it. Basically, WinXP was configured to auto use DMA, and it was using DMA Mode 2 automatically. According to the site: http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/modesUDMA-c.html ...the max expected rate was 33.3MB/s. However after playing with the BIOS I got WinXP to go up to DMA Mode 6. Now I'm getting a transfer rate that is 3-4X faster than before. The difference is astounding. Thanks for all the gurus who helped out! \_ just curious: what did you change in the BIOS? By default in newer mobos the HD access mode is set to Auto, which usually ends up as the highest speed. \_ my MB is kind of weird. It has built in SATA and built in RAID. I disabled both of them long time ago because I didn't use them. When I noticed the performance hit 2 days ago I tried turning them on/off again to see if WinXP would jump from DMA Mode 2 to DMA Mode 6 and it didn't, and as a last resort I reset (default) the entire BIOS, turned SATA/RAID off, and voila, DMA Mode 6!!! In another word, I have no idea what happened, but I guess I should have tried resetting in the first place. |
2005/1/17-18 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35742 Activity:high |
1/17 My DMA is in fact turned on, but I'm hardly getting the 133 rate in my ATA133 as claimed by my motherboard and hard-drive. What are some culprits in the lack of performance? ok thx. \_ How are you measuring the throughput? \_ You know nothing can sustain ATA133 throughput, right? \_ And you're running which OS? \_ Bottleneck is hard drive heads reading data off the spinning platter. I think you max out around 20-30 MB / second these days for a 7200rpm drive for not too fragmented large files. Heck, notebooks have ATA133, why are their hard drives slow? Duh. \_ I've tried transfering 50Gig of content (mostly movies, very little HD head movements) and according to the XP estimation it will take 160 min. So that means the rate is approx 5.2M/sec. That is nowhere close to 20-30MB rate you're saying. I'm very dissappointed... \_ if your source hard drive is defragged and your dest hard drive is empty, you are not doing this across a 100Mbps network or some crappy FireWire / USB 2.0 controller, and 5.2 MB/s turned out to be the user-measured result (as opposed to what Windoze estimates), I'd be disappointed too. \_ yes. Drive 1 is Maxtor 250Gig drive, empty. Drive 2 is WD 200Gig drive, no fragmentation. Both are on the same ATA133 cable. Transfering from 2 to 1 is about 5MB/sec. WHAT IS GOING ON? Why is it so slow??? \_ That *is* slow. Do you have any anti-virus apps doing on-the-fly scanning? \_ nope! Disabled the "real-time" scan. ARGGGGGGGGGGG \_ Okay, now why didn't you give this information from the start? If they're on the same cable, you're running in half-duplex. So your theoretical best is half the max. \_ no. 133ATA means 130000Mb/sec, or 16.6MB/sec. So theoretical limit is 16.6, and assuming half-duplex, it's 8.3MB/sec. I'm getting 5.2MB/sec. I guess 5.2 out of 8.3 is not too bad, but still very disappointing. -op \_ 133 means 133 MB/s http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_device_bandwidths Anyway, re-install Windoze and measure again. \_ Is your NTFS drive compressed? \_ NOPE -op \_ Did you check your primary/secondary IDE channel settings (in Manage Hardware) and verify that DMA is in fact selected? \_ I have run performance tests on literally dozens of drives and they are all like that. 5MB is kind of slow, but you are never going to see 10MB/sec. \_ I just timed a dump of a 2 GB DVD image from drive to /dev/null on my Thinkpad T41. Average 20 MB/s, and watching a realtime monitor it was more like 24 MB/s and then a pause at 0 MB/s while Linux did some poorly timed swapping. I am sure I get better speeds than OP copying from drive to Ipod over USB2. \_ There's also seek time when the sectors you try to read are non- contiguous in the same track, and when the sectors are in different tracks. \_ I believe it's called "latency" when the data resides in the same track. Seek time is moving heads, as you noted. Access time is the overall result. \_ The only time you'll see 133 is when it's reading data that's in the drive's memory buffer. \_ if the little pixies are on strike there will be some slow down \_ Dude where are the true SCSI-files? ATA has always make outrageous claims. It is a combination of the fact ATA just not "robust" enough to support that many drives and Windoze sucks at FS. |
2005/1/12 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35681 Activity:high |
1/12 DVD can't be read by windows. How do I convert to Mpeg-4? \_ google afterdawn. then teach me how. thx! \_ Is there a complete sentence in there struggling to get out? \_ You're just being snotty. --!op \_ Nope. I actually don't understand what is being asked. \_ How are you going to convert a disc if you can't read it? Or do you mean that: a) you don't have an MPEG2 decoder b) the disc is region-locked and of a different region ? \_ DVD players on a DVD player. When you put it in my computer DVD, you can't read any files using WinExpl. You can't play it on my DVD player either. However, I can copy the DVD using my computer. \_ "DVD players on a DVD player"? Huh? |
2005/1/12 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35672 Activity:very high |
1/11 Using SATA (serial ATA) as the one and only primary HD, any problem with boot up? How about with motherboards built in say, 2002? Any problem with that? Pros/cons with SATA? Comments? \_ You expecting to install Windoze on SATA and have it boot? \_ I had to get a special driver floppy to install Win XP on a recent box w/ onboard SATA. It wasn't too hard, though. YMMV. --dbushong \_ Does post SP2 work? If so, why can't you just slipstream in SP2 into the base Windows and burn a CD? A lot of newer desktop comps don't come with floppies. -williamc \_ slipstreaming worx theoretically but i'm lazy \_ adding to this, you need to keep around a spare floppy drive even if you don't intend to leave it in the system just for this reason (unless you have a bootable Windows XP SP2 CD with working CD key). WinXP won't accept the SATA drivers on CD. \_ uh, painful. Why in hell would anyone upgrade to SATA? It seems more trouble than it's worth. \_ I just built a new PC with SATA disk. I didn't have to go through all that when installing XP (pre-SP1). It was quite flawless. \_ you mean you didn't need a driver floppy? also, somewhat related, the link below says both serial and parallel ATA drives will have problems formatting to a full 160GB using pre-SP1 http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/disc/faq/137_winxp.html okay, here's an article that says a Soltek mobo didn't need a floppy http://www.3dxtreme.net/index.php?id=asusa8vdeluxe7 \_ No. And I don't have 160GB. Mine is 80GB from Western Digital. \_ yeah, after some research, it looks like your mobo is doing some emulation that pre-SP1 is happy with. Even some of the newest mobos require a floppy, though, like the Asus A8V (90nm Athlon 64) \_ No, get an Mac Mini. \_ it's not practical as a router unless you want to go wireless only for all your equipment since mini comes with only one network port. \_ I'm not recommending doing this, but I believe one could add USB network adaptors to supplement the internal ethernet port. \_ ifconfig en0 alias ... \_ I was hoping that Apple would include a PCI slot so that I could drop in a dual or quad port PCI 10/100 card and get a fast firewall. The usb 2.0 10/100 adapter is an option that is probably okay for dsl firewalling but not for other stuff. \_ Yeah I personally don't see why having it quite that tiny is useful. I think most people would find a larger size with an extra DIMM slot, AGP slot, and 1 PCI slot more practical than the "OMG it's tiny!" factor. But that's marketing for you. I'm not in the target market. \_ The extra dimm slot isn't a huge issue for me b/c my firewalls don't need more than 512 MB ram. The AGP slot is also not an issue b/c I have a separate system to play games and the builtin video is enough for TV output (DVD/AVI). I can see how having an AGP slot would make it easier to upgrade but this would also increase the size and perhaps make it harder to cool w/ a tiny laptop fan. The lack of a PCI slot is my biggest gripe, but I bought one anyway. |
2005/1/11-12 [Computer/HW/Display, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35666 Activity:moderate |
1/11 So the iMac Mini is basically an evolution of the old Cube thing. Or those little Shuttle PC boxes. Or a Gamecube. But it doesn't seem to make much sense compared to an iBook. Why no digital audio output? \_ you can still do digital audio over usb. Probably the reason there is no spdif connector is b/c of space/price. I think it makes a lot of sense (I bought one for my living room), hopefully it works w/ my HD-TV and I can ditch my noisy xbox and maybe get eyeTv and do HD capture w/ it. \_ And you can also do digital audio over firewire. The Mac Mini is also much cheaper than the Cube. I think it's basically the cube done right. \_ Yeah, and you could've been doing this for the past two years now for about $350 by buying a small multimedia PC at Fry's. Plus you get expansion slots that will fit in a decent VIVO card and you're not stuck with 40 gigs. Apple, the company that's great at repackaging things that already exist for a higher price. \_ I bought a small multi-media PC from Fry's two yrs ago to use as a home theater pc. It was a complete flop. The damn thing was too loud, it ran way too hot to put \_ Really? What was loud about it, the hard drive? The EPIA MB that comes with these devices are fanless otherwise. Perhaps it was the PSU? I have a microtower PSU and it's pretty noiseless. As for heat issues, not quite sure about that one. I guess if you stick in a Radeon XT800 in there it will fry. \_ Mine was a P4/Celeron mb. I got the slowest celeron I could find and I down clocked it so that it would generate less heat. I also got the biggest damn zalman hs that fit in the case. I replaced the 2 40 mm fans w/ 3 quiet (17 db) 40 mm fans. The ps fan was pretty quiet (~ 27 db), but a new quiet ps in that ff would have cost $150 or more (not quiet worth it). I had a GeForce 4 Ti 4600 in the box b/c I wanted the video out. Later I went down to a GeForce 2 which helped a bit in terms of head b/c it was passively cooled. The HD wasn't too noisy b/c I had a cuda4, the main problems were the fans. I needed lots of fans. in my stereo cabinent, windows had the darndest time doing TV out, Wireless support in windows sucked so \_ Never had a problem with Windows doing VIVO. Guess you just suck. I also never had a problem with wireless in Windows. In fact, AFAIK the Apple wireless is crap, the Airport sucks, the builtin WiFi card on the laptops suck, so... \_ I have had exactly the opposite experience. WiFi in Win2K never worked for me (I'm using linksys 802.11G PCI card) and would often cut out intermittently w/ XP. (I did not have this problem w/ the same PCI card in My G4 or my Linux box, I tested them in the same approx spot as the windows PC. The problem w/ video output was that the PC just couldn't display properly on my Wega. I futz around with all sorts of stuff and the display was always screwy. My mac's don't have this problem. I tried the PC after getting an HD Wega and I still have the same problem. I just plug the macs in and they work. I could probably get the PC to work in XP after futzing around w/ drivers &c., but then again I could probably also install linux, rebuilt the kernel w/ 50 patches and d/l the latest cvs branch of 8 different programs and get that to work as well, but these days I don't have time for that. I have never had a problem w/ airport. I have an original abs, a new AEBS and a AE. All work flawlessly w/ my iBooks, my PB, my G4 and my mom's thinkpad. everytime I needed to put movies/music on my HTPC I had to run a ethernet cable from my switch in my rack upstairs down to my living room. Yes I could drop in a 250 GB ATA/100 drive but the extra storage was useless b/c the HTPC couldn't integrate w/ my Digital Lifestyle. Even the hacked xbox which ultimately replaced the HTPC didn't quite fit w/ everything until I got a AirportExpress and I could finally talk to the damn think wirelessly. The problem w/ the xbox is that even though it is a P3 733 w/o a cpu fan, the case fan is loud and I can't seem to find a good quiet fan that will keep the xbox from overheating. The mini-mac is quiet, wireless and integrates perfectly. To me this is worth the apple premium b/c I no longer have time to futz around w/ diy. \_ I know you can do digital audio over firewire but a usb to spdif converter or usb to component audio converter is much cheaper. |
2005/1/11 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35657 Activity:nil |
1/10 Is it generally a good/bad idea to defragment a disk running under VMware? The disks are represented in files, disk.vmdk so I presume thath if I defrag it should make them faster. How about defragging outside? The second question is, is it just my imagination or it seems like copying *.vmdk file is a lot slower than copying regular files? \_ Read the help. Defrag within the guest, then defrag from the Workstation UI (under the disk properties), and then defrag the host. Copying .vmdk files shouldn't be any different from copying other files; they *are* just ordinary files (they just happen to be larger than most others). |
2005/1/8-9 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35611 Activity:low |
1/8 Does an iomega 250MB zip disk work in an iomega 1GB scsi JAZ drive? \_ Why would it? The disks are physically different, aren't they? \_ They appear to be a bit different. Just wanted to confirm. |
2005/1/8-10 [Computer/SW/OS/OsX, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35601 Activity:nil |
1/7 Anyone know why my 700MB (80min) CD-ROMs show up as having only 676megs free when I put them into my apple (OS X), even when they are brand new? I want to burn a disk image, which is only 680megs, but it won't let me. Thanks. \_ Perhaps because 676*2^20 = 708837376? \_ Ah, fascinating. So this is MeBi vs MB? -not op |
2005/1/7 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35586 Activity:nil |
1/7 I just downloaded a disk image that is 676megs, which is 16megs larger than the capacity of my cd-roms. Is there anything I can do to mount/copy it onto the cd-rom? |
2004/12/30 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35492 Activity:nil |
12/29 What's the difference between a CD with a bunch of JPEGs vs. a Kodak Picture CD? I'm asking because the Mintek 5" portable DVD player plays the Kodak Pic CD which is really cool, but I'm wondering if I can stick any CD with JPEGs in it to view. Thanks. |
2004/12/30-31 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35490 Activity:kinda low |
12/29 What is Progressive Scan DVD player? Looking for a nice region-free DVD player with multilingual OSD menu features. Recommendations? \_ word of advice? by 40 dollar dvd players from Costco, anything above 100 bucks breaks down too fast and too expensive to replace.. \_ What is OSD menu features? \_ On screen display. \_ Progressive scan means it can output non-interlaced video, thereby providing better resolution. It doesn't matter if you don't have an HDTV. \_ The resolution shouldn't change but the way the image is displayed will. Regular TV sets display an interlaced image, which is one reason why computer monitors have always had a better picture compared to regular tv sets (computer monitors display non-interlaced video). If you don't have a TV set that can display non-interlaced video, then the progressive output will look like garbage. Many TV sets cannot display non-interlaced video, newer "HD ready" or "Digital" sets usually can. \_ The resolution of the video data on the DVD doesn't change, but the resolution perceived by the viewer will, which is what I meant. (480 scanlines at one time versus 240 scanlines separated across 2/~60ths of a second.) \_ Yes, technically the same resolution but presented in a less crappy fashion. \_ I've had good luck with the cyberhome 300S - very cheap ($30 on sale at radio shack), region free, small profile. Make sure you get one built after March/April 2004, previous versions had heat issues. \_ I have a few minor gripes with the CH300S. The remote is hard to use in the dark (small, uniform buttons). There's a long-ish pause during a layer change. The JPEG viewer will not show any more than 255 images in a single directory. On the plus side, you can enter a secret remote-code to make it region-free. \_ Unless you are going sub $50 or so, get an upconverting DVD player. \_ Philips DVP642. I saw it at Target for $70. You have to unlock region-free yourself via the remote. \_ I bought this and then returned it the next day. The remote feels like a toy, and on my DivX files it was unable to FF or RW (not to mention in one case the sound wasn't synched). Also, the max FF/RW speed was 8x. \_ can you suggest better? that thing looked good to me. -!op \_ I'm afraid not. I currently have an old Aiwa XD-DV170 which has great OSD menu features, but can't play some newer disks (the extra disks in The Two Towers:EE don't play for instance). \_ I've had a Toshiba 5-disc DVD player from costco, really nice unit, which turned out to be a region free one. Had I known that, I would've gotten 2. I don't think they carry it anymore. I also got a Daewoo DVP480 player from Costco, which I got it because it is a region free player. But the Toshiba is much better in terms of build quality and operating noise. Get a cheap DVd player from costco, it may be region free. Don't get the Sony one, I am sure it is NOT region free. |
2004/12/29-30 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35474 Activity:nil |
s12/29 I have random mov, mpeg, avi movies I want to burn to a DVD. Can I use dvd shrink (never used it) to do this? What is the recommended way to make it work? \_ actually I have a similar question. We know the followings: VCD:~700M for ~60 min, 352x240 DVD:4.7G for ~60 min, 720x480 We know that a DVD contains approx 6-7X the size of a VCD. Can you actually copy MPG files from 6-7 VCDs and then burn it on a DVD, which shoulsd last 6-7 hours? \_ Yes. If you do nothing else, you'll have 6-7 MPG files on your DVD, which will vary in accessibility depending on your DVD player. \_ Usually not. A set-top DVD player would: 1. Need to support MPEG1 video. (Which isn't uncommon, since most can play VCDs.) 2. Figure out how to find and navigate the various files you've scattered around on your DVD. --jameslin \_ No, DVD Shrink, not surprisingly, is used for shrinking existing DVDs. It only does transcoding; it's not a general MPEG2 encoder, nor is it a general DVD authoring tool (which you'd need to make menus, chapter points, etc.). I've heard good things about Nero Recode recently. Look around the http://doom9.org forums. --jameslin |
2004/12/25-27 [Computer/SW/Unix, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35434 Activity:moderate |
12/25 Is email down? \_ I am getting an insufficient disk space error when trying to send mail. -!op \_ Fixed. - jvarga \_ Well, wait for the load to get back to normal to actually start getting mail again. - jvarga \_ sweet! df -k /var/spool/mqueue Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/da0s1f 1016303 974635 -39636 104% /var |
2004/12/17-19 [Computer/SW/OS/Windows, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35348 Activity:low |
12/17 Is there a way in WinXP to make it re-scan the USB bus to notice a hard drive that was already attatched at boot time? Restarting or replugging the hard drive works, but it's not automatable and is therefore inelegant. \_ Open your device manager and click the icon on the toolbar to rescan devices. WinXP rescans all hardware and finds your stuff. - jvarga \_ AFAIK no, there is no way. The only "way" is to disable and then re-enable the USB interface through device manager, which is the software equivalent of restarting or replugging in the drive. If you do this a lot then you might want to do it this way since the USB port does wear out. \_ Not to dispute your claim (more out of shock really), but XP doesn't scan the bus at (or soon after) bootup? That sounds extremely strange- does anybody know any justification for this decision? \_ Normal startup, yes. After a hard crash, no. |
2004/12/14-15 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35298 Activity:low |
12/14 What's an easy way to create a DVD image out of a whole bunch of .vob/.bup/.ifo files I ripped straight from another DVD? Been STFW for hours with no luck. I'm looking for something I can mount on a virtual DVD drive under windows (like with d-tools) and watch with something like WinDVD, in lieu of schlepping the actual discs around. \_ Use daemon tools on windows to mount your DVD image. \_ Burn them to an image. Nero has a virtual disc recorder that should be to create a mountable ISO. |
2004/12/14-15 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35294 Activity:nil |
12/14 Anyone know what tool I can use to convert real player files into DVD? I have about 5GB of rm files from an asian television series. I want to convert it to DVD, fitting as much as possible on each disk. (each episode can just be a title by itself and it'll be good enough for me.) Thanks. |
2004/12/1 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35140 Activity:high |
12/1 I think getting 72GB 10K RPM SATA drives at $160 a piece was a bad idea. You could have gotten much larger 7200RPM drives for that price. Most people would take larger quotas over slightly better performance. Besides, a RAID controller with a reasonable amount of write cache memory should have provided a decent write speed even with relatively slow drives. Read speed should also be fairly decent with so many drives and any RAID level. My $0.02 \_ Gee, let's just kvetch about the call after it's been made. Now, this comment might just possibly have been constructive if you'd been able to deliver it beforehand, but what purpose does it serve now? Seems like you're just biting the hand that feeds you because you didn't get fed exactly what you wanted. As for me, hey current CSUA admins: thank you for doing anything at all for me. I realize I'm entitled to nothing, and what you're doing for me is much better than that. What you have done may, or may not have been optimum, but the call was yours to make and I don't think what you did was unreasonable. Please ignore bozos like o.p., who decided to deliver criticism above the thanks we all owe you for your efforts on everyone's behalf. --PeterM \_ Gee, let's just jump all over someone for giving a valid opinion, why don't you. I agree with OP, paying $160 US is too much for 72 GB disks. Maybe it is too late to do something about it, but that still doesn't mean the opinion isn't valid. I don't know what the time schedule was for getting parts, but you could've gotten at least twice the capacity for SATAs in the past two months. Granted, any improvement is better than no improvement, but the OP wasn't demanding anything, just offering advice. -williamc \_ You are making the assumption that we were going for capacity. What we would have liked were SCSI disks. Those are too damn expensive. However, the Raptor (which is 74GB) is a 10K RPM SCSI internals w/ SATA connector disk. This gives us very good performance, without the huge cost. Yes, we could have purchased a 200GB disk, probably even for less than the 74GB ones we invested in, but on a system that has 200+ simultaneous logins, spindle speed and seek times becomes more important than raw storage space. In any case, the CSUA is *not* a data storage facility...if you want lots of storage, buy yourself a drive and put it in your own damn case. --njh (one of the SAs putting in much more time running the CSUA's systems than the motd complainers) \_ PeterM is right, the horse has left the barn. The CSUA SA's have been pretty good over the years, and the uptime at soda beats a lot of commerical systems. AND SODA IS FREE! Instead of bagging on the SA's, make a paypal contribution. If everybody who complained on the motd sent in some money, we'd have a CSUA jet named soda instead of a PC. They've made reasonable decisions in the past, and I'm sure they had one for their choice of disks. -ax of bagging on the SA's, make a paypal contribution. If everybody who complained on the motd sent in some money, we'd have a CSUA jet named soda instead of a PC. They've made reasonable decisions in the past, and I'm sure they had one for their choice of disks. -ax \_ Yes, please contribute to the CSUA! There's a paypal link on the main page now. I did. --allum \_ no dropcash progress bar? \_ I want my lottery-scheduling system! CPU cycles for everyone! -lazy sl0da h0z3r \_ I am putting a box together with a bunch of 200GB SATA drives--any opinions on 5+ disk RAID-5 controllers that are happy with FreeBSD? Also, should I be looking at CPU power management? The thing should be as quiet/cool as possible. -John \_ Think about this for a moment. You're planning to stick five or more > 72K RPM drives in the box, and you're worried about the the heat/power that the CPU is going to generate/consume? The drives are going to suck WAY more power and generate WAY more heat than the CPU. -dans \_ Fair enough, I'm looking at an Antec P160. Will low-rpm drives make any difference? -John \_ Actually, this is wrong. Hard drives these days only pull about 10W each. Processors pull on the order of 100s of Watts. --njh \_ I think you're an idiot. Want to make specific objections? At least sign your name. \_ bigger, faster, more reliable. for a given amount of money, pick any 1.5 \_ yermom can't afford me |
2004/11/30-12/1 [Computer/HW/Memory, Academia/Berkeley/CSUA, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35127 Activity:nil |
11/30 So can we get a hardware summary (purchased and planned) for the new soda machine(s)? It sounds like there's a dual Xeon getting an OS somewhere-- what kind of ram, what kind of storage does it have? How much was it? How much disk does/will it have? Maybe a file in /csua/tmp would be helpful. Thanks. \_ Maybe a CSUA wish list would be helpful. \_ I would like to see this too, but purely out of curiosity. I think that the CSUA admins are probably doing something pretty reasonable. --PeterM \_ Seconded... I'm kinda excited about what we're getting |
2004/11/30-12/1 [Consumer/TV, Computer/HW/Drives, Consumer/Camera] UID:35125 Activity:nil |
11/30 Anyone one have the show "The Adventures of Pete and Pete" on dvd? \_ i thought i was the only person who watched that show. are you 12 too? \- you can watch the french version: http://csua.org/u/a5h \_ "12 too"? Are you making fun of P&P fans? Its a great show. \_ Well, I was 12 when it first came on. It's a great show though, well worth buying on DVD. -op \_ I too used to love this show... I sent away for a casette tape of the theme song and some other music once from a cereal box or something. the band was called Polaris. lemme know if you want some mp3's. - rory |
2004/11/29-30 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35112 Activity:moderate 66%like:35109 |
11/29 So what is TDA? Why does it keep bringing soda down? \_ http://now.cs.berkeley.edu/Td The TDA is filled with nice, old, slow 8GB disks. The TDA isn't bringing soda down, soda is bringing soda down. The issue with the TDA is that the hardware itself is not very reliable. If it turns off, there is no guarantee that it will spin back up again, resulting in a catastrophic loss of the motd (well actually, I think the motd is on an internal disk, but without your home directories you may have a small issue actually logging in). In short, TDA sucks and we're getting off of it. - jvarga \_ ^TDA^Yermom \_ Has screwdriver experienced issues with TDA? \_ Screwdriver is running fibre channel disk, not TDA. \_ Hail the Glorious new revolution! \_ It's a trinary digital assistant, 50% more powerful than a regular PDA. \_ Someone replied before and said it was a terabyte disk array. Is that true? If so, why do we still have measly 30 MB quotas? \_ As I replied to that thread, no, it stands for tertiary disk array. -- njh \_ Because 8GB disks * 4 disks = 32GB of fun for all ~2500 hozers. Type `df` and look at /home/* to see why you don't have huge quotas. There *are* quota upgrades coming with new soda, so donate well! - jvarga \_ I don't think I've ever seen an official upgrade proposal or a request for donation. Do you have a pointer to either? \_ I could have sworn there was an official posting on this... I'll look around or post again. Soda is gettin some dual P4 Xeon luvin (I have yet to figure out how to get them to burn a hole in the machine room wall, but I am definitely trying). Ooodles of disk space and RAM come with it too. Depending on how our finances look (ASUCk money, donations, etc), we are seriously considering offloading mail handling to another machine (and putting virus scanning into the mix to kill off some of that pesky virus-laden mail). We are also looking to give some of the other servers face lifts (upgrades to somewhat modern technology like motherboards without ISA slots like a high-end PIII or something cheap). Everyone will be getting some quota love... maybe up to 100-150MB (don't quote me on this, it isn't set in stone yet because we don't know how much disk we can buy or even what is considered reasonable). I'd love to give official specs on what we are planning, but those are changing because of finances. - jvarga \_ I think everyone else on the motd has asked already, but why dual Xeons? It's a fine choice, apart from the fact that it runs warmer, slower, and is more expensive. \_ We've all asked and have never been given an answer. I think they pulled the choice out of their spleen and have no satisfactory reason. \_ Uh, because it DOESN'T WORK and CRASHES SODA \_ Maybe that's because it was never designed to work with vinum. \_ Are you talking straight out of your ass, or is it taking a detour through your spleen? \_ wc /etc/passwd 2906 6617 203836 /etc/passwd \_ we should each get at some where around 300MB. \_ Sure, if you can make 4 8GB disks add up to 1TB. \_ So what's causing the instability? RAID driver? Hardware? \_ ilyas \_ I may destabilize soda for generations to come. -- ilyas \_ Nah, you'll go back on your medication eventually \_ What's with all the hatin' on ilyas? Isn't tom still around and a good target for kicking? \_ Soda has just been crashing itself lately...no real idea why. The resent *planned* shutdowns were to put bigger disk online. \_ I believe that at a politburo meeting the politburo was told exactly why it was crashing, from people who went thru the crash dumps. Basically, the OS is too old/broken. \_ Well, yes, the OS is old and crufty, but that doesn't explain why soda has been crashing. And yes, I have been going through the crash dumps --njh \_ We should just replace the whole thing with a cheapo terrabyte IDE raid on a P4 3 gig or AMD equivalent. I built one for about $2500. We could each donate like $100 or more and get it done. -williamc \_ Set up the paypal account, and I'll cough up a twenty. \_ There has been a paypal link on the csua web page for at least a month now. \_ But what if williamc collects all the money and then escapes into South America? \_ I'd like to know what the Politburo plans to do before I cough up the dough. \_ See above \_ TDA...Totally Dumb Acronym. |
2004/11/29 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35109 Activity:high 66%like:35112 |
11/29 So what is TDA? Why does it keep bring soda down? \_ http://now.cs.berkeley.edu/Td The TDA is filled with nice, old, slow 8GB disks. The TDA isn't bringing soda down, soda is bringing soda down. The issue with the TDA is that the hardware itself is not very reliable. If it turns off, there is no guarantee that it will spin back up again, resulting in a catastrophic loss of the motd (well actually, I think the motd is on an internal disk, but without your home directories you may have a small issue actually logging in). In short, TDA sucks and we're getting off of it. - jvarga \_ ^TDA^Yermom \_ It's a trinary digital assistant, 50% more powerful than a regular PDA. \_ Someone replied before and said it was a terabyte disk array. Is that true? If so, why do we still have measly 30 MB quotas? \_ Because 8GB disks * 4 disks = 32GB of fun for all ~2500 hozers. Type `df` and look at /home/* to see why you don't have huge quotas. There *are* quota upgrades coming with new soda, so donate well! - jvarga \_ Uh, because it DOESN'T WORK and CRASHES SODA \_ wc /etc/passwd 2906 6617 203836 /etc/passwd \_ we should each get at some where around 300MB. \_ So what's causing the instability? RAID driver? Hardware? \_ ilyas \_ I may destabilize soda for generations to come. -- ilyas \_ We should just replace the whole thing with a cheapo terrabyte IDE raid on a P4 3 gig or AMD equivalent. I built one for about $2500. We could each donate like $100 or more and get it done. -williamc |
2004/11/21-22 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:35000 Activity:nil |
11/21 I have a CD that I can play just fine from my CD player. But when I put it into my CD drive in my computer, the computer thinks it's a blank CD. How can this be? And more importantly, how can I rip MP3s from this CD if my computer won't recognize it? \_ Quick! Sell this CD to the RIAA for a million dollars! \_ It's copy protected--probably something like AEC. Alcohol 120% makes pretty short shrift of this sort of crap. -John |
2004/11/12 [Computer/HW/Drives, Computer/SW/OS/Linux, Computer/SW/OS/Windows] UID:34853 Activity:moderate |
11/12 Dual boot question: I had a hard drive set up with dual boot. XP and Linux. I had problems with the Windows partition. I got a new hard drive. I connected the new hard drive and set it as the slave drive. I went into setup and set it to boot from the slave drive (the new one). I then reinstalled XP on the new drive. Oops. My boot loader on the original drive got overwritten. The Linux partition is still there, but I can't boot to Linux. I need to resetup my dual boot. I would like to have 2 options when I turn on my computer. One option would boot to my Linux partition on my original hard disk (now set as the master). The other option would be to boot to XP on the new hard disk (now set as the slave). I think I want to go into setup and have it boot from the master, and then use my Red Hat CD to resetup the boot loader. But I'm not really sure what I'm doing and I don't want to screw things up. I don't want to reinstall Linux. I simply want to fix the boot loader. Please help! \_ You are already on the right track. You can boot either from the first install CD or you can use the .iso image for the emergency cd. It will guide you through mounting your existing RedHat partition. You can then use either grub or lilo to reinstall the bootblock on the master CD... but you will need to make changes to either your lilo.conf or grub.conf to tell it to book XP from the other drive now instead. Once you finish that, you can go back into the bios and tell it to boot from the primary hd again. \_ You should have installed XP first, then Linux. Windows loves to scribble over the boot partition of every disk it can find. Having said that, if you want to avoid having to reinstall Linux, you will need to boot from a linux boot floppy. At least, that was the only thing I could figure out to do when I was in your boat. Maybe one of these 3l33+3 linux hackers has a better way. \_ Well, I don't need to install Linux. I only need to setup the boot loader. Are you sure this is the same situation you were in? Windows is installed on one drive. Linux on another. And I just want to modify the boot loader, not install anything. \_ When you installed Windows XP it overwrote the MBR on your Linux drive, so no you don't really have Linux installed right now. You have a partial linux installation, that you need to repair. I don't know how to do that. \_ This is far too much spew for a simple question. Why do we need to see useless details about your disks and blah blah? Anyway just boot using the floppy and run the lilo tool or whatever. \_ The problem I've always had with dual-booting is that if one disk goes bad, it can be a real pain to get the other up in isolation. If you're using the Grub bootloader, I know you can install windows to drive 0, take it out, then put your linux drive in as 0 and install Linux. Then put the windows drive back in as drive 1. You can then boot to Linux and set up grub such that when you boot to your windows drive, your windows drive is tricked into believeing it is drive 0. This setup is a bit of work initially, but I've found it to be very robust. If you're interested, I can tell you how to set up grub. -jrleek (!Linux guru) |
2004/11/11 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:34823 Activity:nil 71%like:34789 |
11/8 I am looking for an free external RAID box. Am willing to build it myself, though I have not done that. ESDI seems the way to go. Any pointers? \_ apple xserve \_ He said inexpensive. \_ How many drives do you need? Do you need hardware RAID (yes for anything semi-intensive). If this is just for personal use I'd say get a cheapo x86 Linux box and don't bother with SATA, as it's not much faster than a good IDE drive right now, and it's much easier to find a motherboard that supports 4-8 IDE srives than 4 SATA drives. If this is for business use, disregard this advice. \_ You aren't giving us nearly enough info. How much storage space do you need, for what purpose, what is your budget and what is your skill level? \_ Oh, and also, how will it be connected to the other computer(s)? Will it be simple FireWire or USB2, or do you want a little SAN and in that case do you need NFS, CIFS, or what? -!pp |
2004/11/9-10 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:34789 Activity:low 71%like:34823 |
11/8 I am looking for an inexpensive external RAID box. Am willing to build it myself, though I have not done that. SATA seems the way to go. Any pointers? \_ apple xserve \_ He said inexpensive. \_ How many drives do you need? Do you need hardware RAID (yes for anything semi-intensive). If this is just for personal use I'd say get a cheapo x86 Linux box and don't bother with SATA, as it's not much faster than a good IDE drive right now, and it's much easier to find a motherboard that supports 4-8 IDE srives than 4 SATA drives. If this is for business use, disregard this advice. \_ You aren't giving us nearly enough info. How much storage space do you need, for what purpose, what is your budget and what is your skill level? |
2004/11/9-11 [Computer/SW/OS/Windows, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:34788 Activity:nil |
11/9 I tried using FBSD 4.9 to format a 120GB drive as FAT32. The format succeeded, but I can't mount the drive-- the error message mentions the next free block exceeding the max. Win2k refuses to create FAT partitions > 32GB because Win98 machines have 16 bit utilities that might barf in that situation. The point of the exercise is to have a single large partition that can be accessed from multiple systems (via USB enclosure), and I'd rather not split up the disk into separate partitions b/c I want to use iTunes to manage my music collection, and I'm not sure it can handle 2 or more root folders like this. So, any advice as to what to try next? \_ Sub-mounts. \_ Will that work on Win2k too? Eventually I'd like to get a Mac, where that's probably possible, but for now it's just a Win2k laptop running iTunes. If I split up the 120GB disk into 4 30GB FAT32 partitions, can I mount those on top of each other w/o assigning a Windows drive letter? \_ I don't think you can do it natively. However, the commercial PGP version lets you mount a PGP disk in a directory, so it might be possible. Why don't you want separate drive letters if you have multiple partitions? -John \_ Partition Magic boot disk? |
2004/11/7-9 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:34740 Activity:nil |
11/7 Does anyone know if the I/O Magic 4.0GB GigaBank drive use the IBM / Hitachi MicroDrives inside? Is it possible to take these apart and put it into a PCMCIA adapter? |
2004/11/2 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:34545 Activity:nil |
11/2 Anyone have netflix or walmart DVD rental? What's the max you can get for each month? Specifically, what's the turn-around time if you get 3 DVDs each time and you drop it off in the mail the next morning? I am in the bay area. Thanks. |
2004/10/29 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:34434 Activity:nil |
10/29 Any speculation on Sony's PSP as a media player? I could see Sony reissuing a bunch of their movies on UMD, but I can't imagine there will be a way to convert your DVDs or other video sources to a format the PSP can use because of Sony's fixation on piracy. \_ There's no reason it can't make a fine DVD player, especially chipped. To be honest, I'd rather consider a Mini-ITX box booting from a CF card, than a game console that I happen to be able to play some movies/CDs on. -John \_ PSP = Play Station Portable, a handheld which uses a cartridged disk called UMD, not a DVD (different sizes). |
2004/10/26-27 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:34345 Activity:kinda low |
10/26 Any experiences with Zalman TNN500A cases? Are they worth the huge gobs of cash they cost? -John \_ Holy crap, that's over $1000 for a case... \_ Have you tried the Antec Sonata case ($100) with Zalman CPU fan and Zalman silent video card cooler? It runs pretty quiet. \_ No, but thanks much for the tip. I have given up on finding an external firewire-attached SATA RAID 5 array; the idea for the Zalman was to have a server with about 6 big disks in it. It's nice & solid too, but that Antec case looks nice. -John \_ Arena |
2004/10/24-25 [Recreation/Dating, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:34315 Activity:very high |
10/24 Can somebody tell me what this is: http://www.airetight.com/images/Via%20Resti%20Vid%20Web%20st.mov \_ In a word...boring. I haven't felt this ripped off from a motd link since the last time John posted one of those ass links. \- it seems to me this was an inquiry and not an attempt to entertain. \_ I don't remember posting an ass link, but if I did, you can be assured that it would be a discriminating, fascinating and interesting ass link. -John \_ Judge for yourself, dude. http://csua.com/?entry=32231 \_ Oh yeah, _that_, well, that was, er, an artistic statement (or me getting impatient with the HEIL GERMAN JOHN guy, I forget.) Anyway, it's the context that counts. I thought the contrast of the dirndl/girlfriend thing with an ass link was nicely representative of the duality of man. -John \_ Good recovery. \_ It's a skill I've honed relentlessly ever since that raid on Macho Grande. -John \-Hello, if you mean thepiece of music, it is the "Via resti servita, Madama, brillante" duet from the middle of ActI of Le Nozze di Figaro. The woman in red sings Susanna [to marry Figaro] and the other one plays Marcellina [who is an old bat in the opera] ... the scene is sort of a funny bitch vs bitch encounter. If you are asking about the the performance, I dont know who/where it is but it looks like some kind of lesbo-Sex in the City hybrid performace art version. ok tnx. \_ psb, is that you. Only psb uses \- \_ But he puts a space after it. \-well, not always. --psb \_ psb also signs off with the "ok tnx" \_ he's also the only one who says "Hello, ..." \_ If I buy the full DVD, do they get nekkid and start making out? \- that is what happens in the original 2 act version of NdF but was changed in the modern 4act version. --psb \_ You need to buy the director's cut platinum commemorative DVD. It's got a killer WAM lookalike commenting on the hot lesbo action. -John |
2004/10/19-21 [Consumer/Camera, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:34238 Activity:kinda low |
10/19 Have you ever purchased a photo cd when developing your pictures? What format, resolution, and size are the images? \_ A related question. What's the difference between Photo CD and Picture CD? Thx. \_ PhotoCD is the professional one, very expensive, maybe around $35 per roll. They give you various resolutions for each picture, I've heard the max is around 3000x1500 or something. PictureCD is what you see when you go to Costco, Walmart, etc. It is relatively cheap, developing plus CD is around $8-10. The resolution is something like 1536x1024. The good thing is it looks identical to your print, which is hard to get if you scan the negative directly, the bad thing is the resolution sucks, even compare to cheap digital cameras. If you shoot film, it's a nice and fast way to get a 'catalog' of pictures to your computer. If cost is not too big of an issue, I'd recommend you try it. I do not recommend PhotoCD. If you want to go that route, maybe you should've picked up the Digital Rebel for $500 from OneCall when they have one of those deals. \_ I wished Kodak had provided a higher resolution PictureCD service, because to them the cost os nothing, the developing of film is in the digital domain anyway now a days. If I can get 3000x1500 PictureCDs from my 35mm film for $10, then I might not have jumped on the digital SLR bandwagen so fast. They only have themselves to blame for the inevitible. \_ You are forgetting the cost to create the CD...it takes machine time. At least in the early days, this wasn't cheap. \_ How much could a machine with a 1x CD-writer cost in the 'olden-days'? $10K? Depreciate that over the use it would get in 2-3 years. If they burn only 4 discs per day in 250 business days, that still comes to about $3/disc for usage of the machine, and for later machines, well we all know what hapened to CD-R prices and speeds. |
2004/10/8-9 [Computer/SW/OS/Windows, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:33992 Activity:nil |
10/8 If I am creating a swap/temp partition on a disk, is it better if the partition is in the beginning? end? does it matter? Assuming beginning is the center of the disk, it would imply it being faster, right? \_ I don't know where the 'beginning' is, but in benchmarks, the beginning is always faster. I seem to remember some weird problem once where the boot loader could not load kernels after like the 1024th sector or something. \_ I want to create a 10GB temp partition and mount it under C: for use as a temp directory... \_ there is somethint seriously fallacious about attempting to optimize performance while swapping. Eliminating swapping altogether should be the priority. \_ agreed. You're (op) really barking up the wrong tree, even for a temp directory. \_ I want to redirect everything temporary to this partition, such as %temp, ie cache, etc. This is so that the main OS partition does not get fragmented over time and becomes slower and slower. It is generally easier to reformat the temp partition and file writing on the temp partition is a lot faster than on a fragmented main partition. We are talking about different things. -op \_ this is why one usually puts the 'temp' partition on a memory based file system. Again in this case performance is optimized by keeping this OFF THE DISK, making disk performance needs mostly irrelevant. \- partitioning makes sense. worring about underlying physical layout is silly. nuff said. if you want to waste your time, feel free. |
2004/10/4-6 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:33916 Activity:low |
10/4 Good place to buy decent DVD+R cheap? \_ Fry's, 30-40c a disk. \_ Those are usually cheap brands. I want slightly better brands such as Verbatim, TDK, etc... \_ Again, Fry's, 60-1.20, depending on rebate offer. \_ http://meritline.com, try BeAll disc's. great quality, great price. \_ http://www.rima.com awesome!! |
2004/9/30-10/1 [Computer/HW/Drives, Consumer/TV] UID:33854 Activity:nil |
9/30 Besides DVDFab, are there any nice freeware program like DVDShrink that will backup a DVD onto 2 DVD-R? |
2004/9/23 [Computer/SW/Unix, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:33715 Activity:very high |
9/23 I need to make an image of a disk a disk on a different machine in Linux. That is, Make an image of A's disk, on B, and then later be able to just copy the image back on to A. ADDENDUM: It would be nice to be able to compress the image on the way out. Tar and gzip or bzip2 I suppose. \_ Is this a question or an observation? I need a big-breasted blonde to cook and clean for me. \_ I'd rather have a big-breasted blonde to have sex with me. \_ have u tried something like 'dd if=/dev/diska | ssh machineb "dd of=/dev/diskb"' \_ I think you're looking for something like Norton Ghost. Check out g4u (Ghost for Unix), probably hosted on sourceforge. |
2004/9/21 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:33671 Activity:very high |
9/21 Here's another question: Is it possible to lock a CD or DVD drive so that the disk cannot be removed by a member of the thieving public, but it can still be opened by someone authorized? \_ I think you want to put the drive on a server somewhere and mount it as a directory. Or just get a big harddrive... \_ Disk: No. PC case: sometimes. You'll notice that a lot of cases have locks on the back, or loops for padlocks. These will not dissuade anyone seriously motivated, though. For laptops, Kensington locks. -John \_ Kensington locks,hehehe. |
2004/9/21-22 [Computer/HW/Drives, Recreation/Media] UID:33669 Activity:high |
9/21 Must kill Lucas. Waited at 1201AM at Tower to buy it. Knowing the bastardizations. It is worst than I thought. There are new BG lines, changes in the style of FX, bloopers still left in! \_ of course, ALL these changes have been documented for weeks. Just had to go to any website (theforce.net), and you'd know. \_ Are you kidding? You waited at tower till 12:01 to pay too much for some DVDs you knew would suck? Wha? \_ LASERDICS RIPS! LASERDISC RIPS ARE THE STANDARD STAR WARS DVD!! \_ Ha, ha, laserDICS. Anyway I got one of these and was all excited. Then I watched a couple scenes on my PC to check it out and realized how childish it is and how I seem to have outgrown it. Maybe the prequels and all the analysis and hype killed the magic for me. When Vader speaks I have an image of fat James Earl Jones in my mind. \_ Er, maybe its just that after the 20 MILLIONTH TIME, it isn't all that exciting anymore. People need to stop giving Lucas money. \_ This totally reminds me of the Conan O'Brian where Triumph visits the line for the episode I premiere. Here's the video in question: http://csua.org/u/95d \_ this is 95% true for me -op \_ Has there been a change in the end of ROTJ, where the apparitions appear? Natalie Portman isn't in there, is she? \_ Anakin's ghost is now Hayden. \_ Get a life - William Shatner \_ Learn how to act - Fans \_ Stop appearing in ads for the Ramada. \_ Priceline. |
2004/9/21 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:33668 Activity:high |
9/21 Has anyone tried DVDs from http://www.asiandvd.com or similar sites? I was wondering since VCD is the prevailing format in Asia, do these Asian DVDs actually hav DVD-quality video or do they only have VCD-quality video converted to DVD format? Thanks. \_ It varies, a lot. Some of them are shitty pirated VHS/VCD transfers, some of them are full DVD quality with extras. It varies by \_ It varies, a lot. Some of them are shitty pirated VHS/VCD transfers,\ some of them are full DVD quality with extras. It varies by publisher and even by movie within a particular company. Read review sites if you are looking for a particular one. --oj \_ where to get Churasan DVD's with english subtitles? |
2004/9/18-20 [Computer/HW/Drives, Recreation/Media] UID:33614 Activity:high 54%like:33810 |
9/17 Anyone have plans to buy the Star Wars DVDs? \_ What's the point? Hasn't everyone already seen the trilogy ad naseum for the past 25 years already? Is it really worth your time and money to see an addition 10 seconds of modified footage? Isn't it time to shelve the action figures and get a life? \_ Hell no. Meesa fucking hate star wars. \_ only if the Force permits me. \_ obThese aren't the DVD's you're looking for... \_ Already got this: http://csua.org/u/8xa (Unadulterated SW on DVD) \_ Can you post md5 or sha1 hashes for all the files? Some of the sections of the VOBs I downloaded from BitTorrent seem to giving me problems. \_ Tell me how to do this, and I will. \_ If you're using Windows, then you can get md5sum from http://unxutils.sourceforge.net. Then you run md5sum -b *.* It'll take awhile though... |
2004/9/17-19 [Consumer/TV, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:33609 Activity:nil |
9/17 Special Edition Bourne Supremacy DVD: http://www.dvdplaza.fi/forums/showpost.php?p=380237 |
2004/9/17-18 [Computer/HW/Memory, Computer/HW/CPU, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:33587 Activity:low |
9/17 How difficult is it to host a virtualized FreeBSD server? Not commercially, just want to let a friend go nuts with it. Something like what's described at http://www.johncompanies.com/jc_bsd.html but I don't care so much about uptime and reliability. Is this guy just using a jail, or is it more vmWare-like solution? \_ Jail. Very straight-forward. I love the part about their special technology. You just need a unique IP/server. -John |
2004/9/16 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:33558 Activity:high |
9/15 One of my DVD's is scratched up and I can't copy the VOB file to my PC. What are some recovery programs I can use? Thanks. \_ Some brands of DVD drive (eg. Plextor, Pioneer) are better than others at recovering errors. \_ Did you try reading using your DVD burner yet? Also, I had a similar problem. I think I fooled around with yermom. I mean, the read options in DVD Decrypter. \_ DVD-backup related question: I've got a VOB file but I don't know what the DVD's original name was (i.e., DVD_THE_MOVIE). Is there a generic name I can assign the DVD when I burn it? Arbitrary names don't work. \_ I usually see DVD_VIDEO as the generic volume label. |
2004/9/2 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:33316 Activity:nil |
9/2 For the hostage crisis, here's one plan: Have a confidental meeting with the family members of the hostages, explaining to them that we (well, the Russian govt) know that the hostage-takes are going to blow up everyone no matter what we do, hence we're going to raid the school beause that's more likely to save more. Then keep the family members away from the media and start the raid as quickly as possible after the meeting. After it's over, family of the hostages alive would be grateful, and those of the dead ones will hopefully understand that the raid isn't a mistake. \_ you are brilliant. call the kremlin with this remarkable plan. \_ Nanobot assassins are the answer. \_ And YOU soldier will get to be the first one in! GO, GO, GO! \_ I wonder if Russia is going to take Isreal's stance on guns in schools? |
2004/9/2 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:33309 Activity:nil |
9/2 If i buy a MotherBoard with 2 SATA ports, does that mean I can only have 2 SATA devices attached or is there some chaining possible? \_ Only 2 SATA drives, although your MB probably has 2 ATA connectors too for optical drives and the like. |
2004/9/1 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:33272 Activity:high |
9/1 Securely destroy your CD/DVDs: http://www.primera.com/ds360_disc_shredder.html \_ Don't CDs often have stuff you aren't supposed to breathe in them? \_ nuke it in the microwave. \_ Do people really need this? If I just break a CD in half, can someone else still repair it for reading? I thought one scratch is enough to render a CD unreadable, let alone a crack repaired with glue. \_ CDs have a lot of error-correcting bits. If the crack does not damage too much data on any given track it might be recoverable. If you want to experiment, take a CD you don't care about and make one long scratch radially. There's a good chance of still reading the data. \_ It depends what you mean by "unreadable". A CD broken in two will not be readable by sticking it into your CD drive, but if it contains interesting data, someone could optically scan the surface and reconstruct it. -tom \_ If you can very cleanly epoxy the 2 halves together, it might read in a normal drive. \_ This conversation reminds me of a story my mom told me. While she was working at the high school library, some kid came up to her and complained that the CD drive on a particular computer wasn't working. She went over, and found an AOL disk in the drive that had been run over by a car and broken into five or six pieces. The kid had taped it all back together with scotch tape, and just couldn't understand why his CD wouldn't work. Maybe someone should've explained error correcting bits to him... |
2004/8/24-25 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:33113 Activity:high |
8/24 I've been thinking about getting a 2 GB Microdrive for my digital camera (Digital Rebel) so that I can start shooting pictures in RAW format. Has anyone used a microdrive for this purpose? If so, how well has it worked for you? tia. \_ microdrives are slow, and very unreliable compared with flash media. you'll do better with multiple, smaller flash cards. -tom \_ "seconded" \_ You can buy flash-based drives up to 4 gigs. \_ microdrives used to be cheaper and bigger than flash drives, which made it popular, but those two are no longer issues. and microdrives are very prone to failure at high altitude/low pressure. \- While I agree flash media is probably more reliable in theory, I dont think microdrives are especially unreliable. I have used them above 13,000ft without problem. So if you have them, I wouldnt worry about using them. If you are buying something new, without looking at price "sweet spots" I'd probably buy 512meg flash cards to avoid putting all your eggs in one basket. These are light, quick to swap so I dont see the point of consolidating. I suppose if you are alays shooting at +50megs per image that is another matter, but I think that is a mistake for reasons I wont go into. I'll be curious if you are still shooting RAW in 6mos. --psb \_ I still shoot only in RAW mode, and have been using it for several months. Try doing a side by side comparison of tone or curve adjustments in 16bit and 8bit images. I can fit over 60 images on my 512MB card, using RAW mode on my Canon D60. -meyers \_ I've got a 256mb card right now, and it just isn't big enough to shoot more than a few pictures in RAW. I thought that by getting a 2 GB Microdrive I could at least shoot some pictures in RAW ever now and then. I still intend to shoot the majority of my pictures as fine jpg. \-yes that is fine. i am betting in 6mos you will not be shooting the maj in raw. let me know if i am right. --psb \_ I think he is saying that now. |
2004/8/20-21 [Consumer/Audio, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:33037 Activity:kinda low |
8/20 Does anyone use an iRiver hard-drive based MP3 player? Suck or rock? \_ if you don't get any responses, go to http://newegg.com, http://epinions.com, http://amazon.com, http://cnet.com, in that order. there are a lot of iRiver models. \_ Just read through iriver's forum(off the international website.) They may have a lot of features, but it's quite unpolished. \_ Yes. I like my iHP-120. --jameslin |
2004/8/19 [Computer/HW/Drives, Computer/HW/Memory] UID:33005 Activity:moderate 77%like:33018 |
8/18 Anyone have any experience getting a bootable .iso onto a USB memory key (yes, it is bootable and has enough space). -John \_ I just did this recently. I haven't found a way to get a .iso directly on, but here's what I did: 1) Format the USB storage 2) use mkbt to get the boot sector from the .iso and then put it on the USB storage. (Get mkbt at: http://www.nu2.nu/mkbt 3) copy files from .iso to memory key I used daemon-tools to mount the .iso to rip the boot sector. Oh, and if you want to use Ghost's boot disk creator, you can use a virtual floppy drive so you don't have to use a physical floppy: http://chitchat.at.infoseek.co.jp/vmware/vfd.html \_ There's not even a readme for this. What exactly does it do? \_ Readme for which? vfd is a virtual floppy. Install it and you've got a virtual floppy drive. mkbt extracts boot sectors and writes them. \_ Oh, and this is where I got most of my help on this: http://www.weethet.nl/english/hardware_bootfromusbstick.php \_ Many thanks, swami. *bows* -John |
2004/8/15-16 [Computer/HW/Laptop, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:32905 Activity:nil |
8/14 Inside Al-Qaeda's HD: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200409/cullison |
2004/8/14-15 [Computer/SW/Apps/Media, Consumer/Audio, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:32903 Activity:very high |
8/14 I'm looking for (a description of) the rules for 5-6 player expansion for settlers of catan. brief desc. to URLs to the real mccoy, appreciated. \_ http://boardgamegeek.com/game/2807 might be a good place to start \_ bigger board (can check the dimensions for you if you like), and build phase after each person's turn. Not much else, IIRC... build phase after each person's turn. Not much else, IIRC... (!op) \- see this is one of those cases if you posted non-anonymously and either i liked you, you you were a generally useful and either i didnt hate you, or you were a generally useful member of the sloda community, i'd have just offered to FAX them to you. your loss. --psb \_ YOU ARE SO FUNNY!!! |
2004/8/13-15 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:32880 Activity:low |
8/13 I have a question. CDs that are burned using say 52x, when the data is read back, does the drive have to spin it up to 52x? ie, are there any differences between CDs that are burned using 8x vs 52x? Are the data interleaved differently? What about DVD? \_ DVD players play at the same rate it needs to play any dvd \_ It's all written the same way. The only concern is if you have low quality discs they might not write correctly at 52x, but you'd notice that right away. \_ Think about your question. The "x" in "52x" is the PLAY SPEED. |
2004/8/10-11 [Computer/SW/OS/Windows, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:32812 Activity:moderate |
8/10 What command line tool exist for windows to create an iso image from a directory structure? or from a set of files specified on the cmd line or a input file? thanks. \_ mkisofs. oh wait, you said "command line tool ... windows" \_ Uhm, cdr-tools (where mkisofs comes from) has been ported to Windows for quite some time now. Just google it (some german guys wrote this). Oh wait, you're a moron... \_ I am a moron who doesn't use Windows. \_ despite your deleting this there is still mkisofs for windows: http://www.dimensional.com/~sitaram/CD-R-for-CLUEd-in-Windows-users.html http://tinyurl.com/4vm69 \_ Try daemontools but I haven't tried it in a looong time. \_ Daemon Tools mounts ISo images, not creates them, yes? \_ Daemon Tools mounts ISO images, not creates them, yes? \_ I really don't remember. Like I said its been a long time. Maybe their site will point you to writing tools if they don't have them. |
2004/8/9-10 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:32797 Activity:moderate Edit_by:auto |
8/9 How do you rip DVDs using Windowz XP? Why delete this???? \_ dvd decrypter (rip) -> dvdshrink (shrink to 4.7GB) -> Nero (burn) \_ What's the program to copy a DVD movie as is to 2 DVDs? I forgot the name. It allows you to split and can provide different graphics for insert 2nd disc... \_ dvdshrink lets you do that too. anyways, the feature is prevalent in much software. \_ OMGWTFFOB!!!~~@@1111!! \_ http://www.filemirrors.com/search.src?file=dvdshrink32setup.zip Reduces 7.4gig CD, then makes an image |
2004/8/6-8 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:32751 Activity:moderate |
8/6 Are there any windows program that would split files/directories by certain size? Let's say I have a few directories containing 5gb of data. Any programs that would group them into 700mb chunks (pick files until they get to 700mb, then begin next chunk) so that I can burn them onto CD? DVD is not an option, I want to know if there are ways to break them into chunks... something that may works with nero perhaps. thanks. \_ burntothebrim? http://bttb.sourceforge.net \_ this application failed to start because wnaspi32.dll was not found.....? wth? this is windows xp... \_ Do you have ASPI drivers for your CD drives? \_ This is my work computer, maybe that's why. will try again at home. thanks. \_ http://bttb.sourceforge.net/Help/bttb_faq.html \_ Try http://downloads.com in the CD management section. Programs like this were written a long time ago for floppies. I've seen the same thing for CDs. \_ Here's a DOS app I wrote several years ago: ~yuen/temp/bsplit.zip. You can unzip and run the .com or the .exe, or you can compile the .c yourself if you worry about viruses. --- yuen \_ install cygwin, then use tar and split \_ this is too much trouble. I need my cd to be able to use as is with the minimum amount of software needed. No one that I'll be giving the CD to understands what a tar file is. ;) In case you are wondering, I need to burn those jpg files on to CDs and give to relatives. \_ WinZip can open tar files, they don't need to understand anything. \_ zip supports multivolume archives. you can just create a big archive where each piece is about 700 MB. winzip should be able to extract them. |
2004/8/5-6 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:32724 Activity:high |
8/5 I have a VCD which is in PAL format. How can I convert it to NTSC, either in DVD or VHS, so I can play it in players here in the US? Do commercial video converter places know how to deal with VCD? \_ I have a link to a good site with all sorts of converters and media tools at home. Mail me and I'll dig it out. -John \_ on linux, mencoder/mplayer is very nice and supports all kinds of resampling/transcoding options. i've never tried to change video framerate or interlacing, but i think it allows any playback filter to be used during translation. \_ i am looking for similiar beast: convert real video to mpeg-1 format. Is there anything non-commercial exists for linux/unix platform? \_ Are there such things as PAL VCD and NTSC VCD? I thought PAL and NTSC are TV formats, and all VCDs are of the same format that can be played on a PC. I thought there are only such things as PAL VCD player which outputs PAL signals to the TV when playing a VCD, and NTSC VCD which outpus NTSC singals when playing the same VCD. No? \_ No, totally wrong. NTSC VCDs are 29.97 fps (or 23.976 fps) and 352x240, whereas PAL VCDs are 25 fps and 352x288. Anyhow, to the OP, if you're using Windows, you can use AviSynth + VirtualDub to do the conversion. I probably can you walk you through this if you want. Email me if interested. --jameslin \_ No, you're wrong. There is no such thing as a PAL/NTSC VCD or DVD. The data is in digital format. The terms have no real meaning but merely denote the resolution and the fps. FPS and resolution have no real bearing on NTSC or PAL format. A so-called PAL DVD can technically be played on an NTSC device and vice versa. The device outputs NTSC or PAL. NTSC and PAL are analog formats, not digital. Relevant link: http://www.michaeldvd.com.au/Articles/PALvsNTSC/PALvsNTSC.asp -williamc \_ You're arguing technicalities in semantics. Does it matter? You still can't play a "PAL" disc in an NTSC player, because most NTSC players won't do any conversion for you. The grandparent post said that "all VCDs are of the same format", but that's not true; there are different frame sizes and frame rates, and they are real issues. --jameslin \_ I see! So is NTSC TV 29.97 fps or 23.976 fps? Or does an NTSC TV switch fps according to the broadcast signal? \_ NTSC is 29.97 frames per second (well, 59.94 fields per second). A DVD or VCD that is 23.976 frames/second (i.e., from a film source) gets telecined to 29.97 fps by the DVD/VCD player by duplicating two fields of every 10 (29.97 * 8/10 = 23.976). --jameslin \_ Say NO to PAL! Support Freedom Videos! |
2004/8/4 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:32687 Activity:nil |
8/4 Ha, I guess vinyl lasts longer than CDs after all: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/music/3940669.stm \_ CD's were an obvious fucking rippoff from day one. here's the real challenge: name *any* data storage medium of any kind that sucks more than CD for longevity. \_ floppy disks \_ floppy disks don't leak as much, so they're arguably better for keeping your data securely stored. \_ if you don't mind losing the argument. \_ cd's aren't ruined by magnets. \_ I'll bet that stone tablets last even longer. \_ Can we have a digital medium that is widely and easily accessible and has long life? Yesterday MO thread shows that you can protect your data against a glancing nuclear attack but unable to read it because of a lack of a driver, or transfer all your archive from CD -> DVD -> blue ray every few years as technology advances? |
2004/8/3-4 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:32667 Activity:high |
8/3 Does anyone have tried using MO drives (like Fujitsu) for backup/ archive? Is it worthwhile? \_ Do they hold a lot more data than DVDs? Otherwise, what's the point? \_ No, infact MO holds much less than DVDs. They might have 4gb ones now, but nothing close to the 8gb and its not like you can afford the 4gb disks in any large quantity (as compared to DVDs, which are about $1 for 4x rated media). \_ What's an MO drive? \_ Magneto-optical; the first removable-disk technology (predates Zip). I don't think they're large enough to be worth using for backup. 2.3 GB? Way too expensive for that kind of capacity. -tom \_ I guess even a broken clock is right twice a day. \_ Yes MO is expensive, but they "supposedly" have good archival characteristics. I am wondering if it is a good way to archive important data like thesis, paper, photograph etc, or things that you want to be able to retrieve a few years from now and are not that huge. -- op \_ Do you know a drive that can read one of the original 44MB cartridges? That was less than 10 years ago. -tom \_ I am not aware of 44MB, but supposedly the 3.5 ones should be able to read back upto 128MB, because it is an ISO standard. \_ Well, do what you want, but in my opinion, if you're looking for data archival, you don't want to be using a technology that few others are using. Especially if it's expensive. -tom \_ If you don't mind that MO drives are slow, MO disks are low capacity (in comparision with a DVD) and expensive and that most of the drives are still scsi based, MO is great. Sure, your data will survive the next ice age, a emp and a glancing blow by a nuclear weapon. If your pr0n collection is that important, consider MO. If, on the other hand your data isn't that important, stick to the cheap soln., DVDs. BTW, MO is big in Japan (just thought you should know). \_ How is DVD's archival quality? BTW, Fujitsu makes MO with firewire or usb 2. \_ Yes they do, but most of the good drives are still scsi. The fw or usb2 drives are usually the crappy ide version of the drive with a low cost fw/usb2 to ide bridge chip. You've got to ask yourself why you would pay top dollar for MO only to get stuck with cut rate bridge chip. For the vast majority of stuff DVD works well enough. Get the make in Japan stuff (~ $1 per 4x rated disk) Get the made in Japan stuff (~ $1 per 4x rated disk) and make sure that you keep each disk in a separate case and out of the sunlight and you should be good till blueray comes out (2-3 yrs), at which time you will want to ditch your crusty DVDs for blueray disks. \_ I have a MO library right now. I used them back in 1995 as well. There is no redeeming quality. Back then it was cool to be able to store 2 GB on a rewriteable medium, but there is no advantage now. I can't wait to throw my library away. What kind of idiot would go back to early 90s technology now? \- if you are talking about this technology: http://www.pinnaclemicro.com/optical_index.htm it is a serious pain in the ass to use. some genius decided to use this on a DAQ setup and it lead to countless problems. media integrity is useless if there is no device to read it ... especially when the drivers have to be licensed as well. if you want reliability, go with redunancy. that also protects against fire/theft/earthquake/mudslide scenarios. --psb \_ One other point no one has mentioned is this: how many people \_ The point has been made above multiple times. do you know with a MO drive? WTH are you going to do with your disks if your drive goes bad? At least with DVDs you can go to fry's buy a new dvd-rom (or burner given the recent price drops) and get all your data back. |
2004/8/3 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:32660 Activity:nil |
8/3 I bured a backup for a music CD about 3-4 years ago on an imation CD-R. Now the backup has lost 2 tracks and the rest is filled with noise, while the original is still fine. How come CD-R has such short lifespan? I always kept it in shaded and cool place. Now, what media should I used to keep backup of my data? |
2004/8/2-3 [Computer/SW/OS/Windows, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:32637 Activity:very high |
8/2 I'd like to get a USB HDD enclosure and use it to backup data. What's the best format for (1) reliability and (2) compatibility? I'd like to use it store my music on and sync with my ipod, so it would have to work with iTunes, but I wouldn't want to use NTFS because that's not writable from FreeBSD. MSDOS might be a decent least-common-denom, but that seems to waste a lot of space and have reliability problems (fragmentation etc). Can windows mount/write a harddrive in the UFS (CD) format? Am I overlooking a good format? tia. \_ Thanks for the suggestions- I was somewhat against ext2 for reliability concerns (unfounded?), and I guess I meant UDF (I thought it was Universal File System...) Do you happen to know if UDF (or iso9660) is modifiable at all? Most of this stuff is going to be read heavy / write light, so write performance isn't important. More important is each OS being able to recognize a harddrive formatted to look like a CD/DVD. \_ IIRC, the problem with ISO9660 and UDF is that you need to stick a fs image onto the drive. You can't add and delete files later (well, mt. rainier can, but that isn't widely supported outside of windows). BTW, ext2 sux, but it is pretty much your only choice if you want 255 char filenames and unix permissions. If you are okay with 8.3 filenames, then msdos fs might work for you, but I think that you will find that the effective storage space on your drive will be much smaller than with other file systems because of the way that blocks are allocated. Are you okay with using VPC/VMWare on your systems? If so, you may be able to stick NTFS onto your drive and then just use Windows running in the vm to access your drive, share its contents. Then using smb mount you can mount the drive under Linux/*BSD/MacOS X. If you are willing to spend some cash you might want to consider trying to go the hfs+ route. The following urls might be of some help: 1) hfs+ kernel module for 2.4/2.6 linux kernel: http://www.ardistech.com/hfsplus 2) Freebsd hfs+ kernel module (5.0 and newer): http://people.freebsd.org/~yar/hfs 3) MacDisk for Windows: http://www.macdisk.com/mden.php3 4) MacDrive for Windows: http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive5 I haven't used any of these before (I've used the old hfs linux driver in 2.0/2.1 kernel under x86 and ppc linux, but not the current one), so I don't know how well this will work. \_ Try ext2. There are windows, freebsd and macos x drivers for ext2. CD's don't use UFS (Unix File System, aka FFS), they use ISO 9660 (w/ extensions). Perhaps you are thinking about UDF (DVD format)? AFAIK, UDF isn't designed for rw access, so it would be a bad idea for a hard drive. \_ ext2 rw support for Windows is very bad. I would be very careful about rw on ext2 under Windows if you want to keep your data intact for any period of time. Unfortunately I can't offer a good alternative that is cross platform because Windows support for 3rd party drivers is just the shits. You can (again) thank Mr. Gates for that one. \_ ext2 rw support linux is very bad too but people use it. \_ Ha-ha, very witty. Now why don't you STFU and let the adults talk. By "very bad" I mean that you can expect data corruption everytime you access the disk. No, not sometimes, no, not once every ten times, but EVERYTIME you write to ext2 from Windows. Thank you for playing. \_ You can expect data corruption from ext2 everytime you use it as well. If you stopped playing with kiddie boxes and put it in production, you'd find out real fast what ext2 can do to data and you'd either learn how to real fast how good your backups are or be looking for a new job. Thank *you* for playing. I enjoy 'winning' whatever that means on the motd. |
2004/7/30 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:32600 Activity:nil |
7/30 I can't stop browsing http://techbargains.com and spend too much money, what should i do?? \_ I love http://techbargains.com! bitch! \_ I'M RICK JAMES! \_ It wasn't funny the fiftieth time, either. \_ why not? \_ advertise what? people advertise all the time. They advertise how they hate Bush, Cheney, the Liberals, the Hippies, etc. \_ You are all strung out on dorkasterone. \_ You call that advertise? Geez you need to get out more. In the mean time, I am off to browse for more gadgets and spend more $$$. \_ For every piece of crap you're thinking of buying, divide it's price by your hourly take-home pay. This will tell you how many hours you will spend working to buy the thing. Maybe that'll make you think twice. (Hint: Hourly take-home ~= (Annual_Salary)*(1.0-Total_Tax_Rate)/2000 \_ What does this have to do with templates? \_ It was about someone who can't control their spending, but that thread got nuked and there was a mis-merge. \_ Cool, the ipod is only a few days salary!! \_ Keep in mind that a whole lot of your work time has to go to housing, car, retirement, and maybe kids. Perhaps 35 hours a week are going to things you really shouldn't skimp on... If only 10% of your income is disposable, then you really should use 10% of your take-home pay as the divisor number. \_ it's just $5.7/h, OUCH!! time to get those roommates back to fuel my gadget buying... |
2004/7/27-28 [Computer/HW/Display, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:32501 Activity:high |
7/27 What are some good sites that give you good bargains to products? I'm looking for a digital cam and I'd like something that is similar to http://bestbookbuys.com, but for cameras. Thanks. \_ You squished other people's changes. Use motdedit. \_ No. \_ http://www.techbargains.com - the only one you need, run by some berkeley dudes I think... \_ http://bensbargains.net (really good) \_ http://pricescan.com \_ pricescan sucks. \_ They all suck, use http://www.techbargains.com they have lots of camera deals. Even if they don't have it RIGHT NOW, expect some deals to show up within a week or two. |
2004/7/26 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:32482 Activity:very high |
7/26 r0x0r, d00d. I just put together my Athlon 64 3200+ (Newcastle) with an Asus K8V SE Deluxe with an AMS gMono $50 case and Enlight $32 EN-8361934A1 power supply, Lite-On DVD 166S reader and 812S writer (flashed to 832S VS08), and it runs quiet (didn't need the Zalman cooler) -- all gotten at http://newegg.com -- and it only uses 67 watts at idle because it downclocks to 1 GHz from the maximum 2.2 GHz it can run when there's nothing running !!!1!111 radeon 9600 xt! d00m ]|[ here I cumm!!!!51@%^4$ \_ rad! \_ On a more serious note, I just upgraded to a 10kRPM SATA HDD and it's pretty nice. \_ 37GB / 74GB raptor? \_ Yes, 74, very fast. \_ any noise issue? I originally planned to get one of those but then on balance it seemed silly. my 7200 rpm drive is silent and I never wait on it. Hope you have >= 1GB RAM. The money would have been better spent on a faster vidcard. \_ I can hear it, but it's much quieter than the old drive I already have 768MB RAM and a GeForceFx 5600 -PP,!OP I'd say it's quieter than my 7200RPM W.D. and it a lot quieter than my CPU and case fans. \_ A 5600 non-ultra is kinda crappy. 1GB RAM really makes things snappy for me, since I never have to page to disk no matter how much stuff I run. I think avoiding disk is more important than faster disk. For videocards, this ranking is pretty accurate: http://www.shacknews.com/ja.zz?id=8221450 Good deals seem to be: 256bit ATI 9800SE $150 9600 XT ~$150 9800 Pro ~$200 (oem) If you don't really care about games then whatever. I guess that HDD will load levels bitchin' fast. \_ The video card it about a year old, when it was fairly hot shit. \_ 74 GIG only? My IDE has 250Gig... \_ Try finding a 10K RPM IDE drive. \_ I have ~500GB on other drives, but none of them have a 4.5ms average seek time. \_ so basically you might be able to run D3 @ medium quality :) \_ Do I look like I'm made of money? \_ yes, I am irritated that my CPU dropped $52 in < 1 wk. :( -op |
2004/7/22-23 [Computer/SW/OS/Windows, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:32425 Activity:very high |
7/22 Is there any convenient way to upgrade (replace) my primary hard drive in WindowsXP without having to go to the trouble of reinstalling my OS and all my apps? \_ Clone your disk. \_ Does that work when the two drives are different sizes? The new one is (obviously) larger. \_ Yes. Afterwards you can even use something to grow that partition. There are several utils that do this. \_ Ghost works, at least. I used it to clone my notebook HD (C: and D:) to a faster, bigger notebook HD -- no problems. \_ Will that work for cloning ATA to a SATA drive? \_ I haven't tried it, but I believe you just need Ghost to "see" your SATA drive -- Ghost runs in DOS. Also, if your drive is > ~ 128 GibiB, you will need Ghost 2003 or later. \_ I thought the XP activation crap checks your hardware configuration, and refuses to run when it's different. \_ The drive is only 1 of several things that it checks for change. On a desktop system you are allowed to have something like 5 different things change before having to simply reregister your key with Microsoft. I've done this sort of thing several times, and even when I did finally have to reregister with them, it happened instantly. \_ Yes, but if you have the right program ... In any case, legitimate users will only need to re-activate their OS through an Internet or phone connection (I think Internet works). I do have a legitimate license, but I don't need the hassle. re-activate their OS through the Internet (?) or by phone call. I do have a legitimate license, but I don't need the hassle. |
2004/7/20-21 [Consumer/Audio, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:32382 Activity:insanely high |
7/20 I want to spend money on something cool. Any suggestions? Probably not willing to spend more than about $2k. \_ take a pilot class, it is really an eye opener \_ Go on a trip. Take a helicopter tour over Kawaii. Go visit the Lourve. (sp?) Or St. Peter's Basilica. You'll remember it forever: it's worth more than some $2k hunk of junk. --PeterM \_ Bah. You mill around with the other tourist cattle looking at pictures of dead white people. Or get sunburned wandering in some rainy island. Just upgrade your PC and preorder Doom 3! \_ give me to me, i'll spend it for you and send you a cool cool greeting card. \_ You need someone to give you to yourself? \_ GFE \_ My girlfriend will give you about 45 minutes for $2k. You won't regret it! \_ Does she do anal??? \_ Sure, yermom is a total ho-bag. \_ How is it dating a whore? \_ Sky? Is that you? \_ How much does your girlfriend charge YOU? \_ Half-a-pound of weed \_ Sweet! \_ Used motorcycle and enough gear to keep from getting killed. \_ Some ideas: - Canon 10D w/ 28-135 USM II IS lens - 23" lcd w/ X800XT or nv6800UDDL - 40 gb iPod + dock + case - Sony WEGA: 34" HD: http://tinyurl.com/5gdty 36" w/o HD: http://tinyurl.com/5nnjq \_ Buy and share a RealDoll(tm) with someone. \_ Buy a RealDoll(tm) with someone else, and share her. \_ dear op, please consider alternatives to material goods. Sure you can buy a cool toy or something, but what about intagible things that'll actually last you a lifetime? Have you considered using that money on education (chef/pastry class, 1/3 of a pilot's license, horseback riding, Princeton Review/MBA, etc)? You can buy cool toys and they'll be fun for a while, but please consider the intangible things that lasts you a lifetime. \_ sometimes those are the same thing, like getting a boat that you then actually use all the time. \_ It is weird to agree with someone entirely and still think they are being a complete pansy. Or, for the majority with south park clue... -phuqm \_ Dude, that is so gay. -Stan \_ Education makes you gay. \_ "The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then -- to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn." -- T.H. White, "The Once and Future King" |
2004/7/18 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:32338 Activity:nil |
7/18 I have a 250GB Western Digital IDE disk (in a firewire enclosure) badblocks size 244198584 * 1024 = 250059350016 bytes fdisk size 30401 * 16065 * 512 = 250056737280 bytes Any ideas why the difference? 2612736 bytes \_ Nevermind, 'fdisk -s /dev/sda' shows 244198584 -op |
2004/7/15-16 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:32302 Activity:low |
7/15 Pioneer announces the A08: http://www.cdrlabs.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?p=118390#118390 http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1622910,00.asp \_ The 12x Plextor is actually faster than this "16x" Pioneer, due to different write strategies. |
2004/7/15-16 [Computer/SW/OS/Linux, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:32301 Activity:moderate |
7/15 I have a FireWire IDE enclosure. If I have static on my body and touch the enclosure while it is running (zap), it resets the drive (click), and causes linux kernel panic. I assume that data would be lost in such a sitation. Is this normal behavior for an ennclosure? \_ Is your power supply connected to a true ground? Or one of those screw-on plugs for older outlets without a ground? \_ The computer is plugged into a three prong power strip, which is plugged into a 3 prong recepticle in the wall. I assumed that the wall plug was grounded (I will test it). The power supply for the firewire enclosure only has 2 prongs. I think that the enclosure is grounded via the FW cable. Also, the aluminium housing of the enclosure is in direct contact with the metal on top of the disk drive. Does static arc between a charged human and a grounded metal? This is the enclosure: http://coolmaxusa.com/cd-309.html \_ Static will arc between any 2 objects that have a different charge level. Since 'grounded' is defined as having no charge you can spark on grounded metal if you build up any charge. Ideally, your enclosure should be grounded. If it is not grounded and you spark on it, the current will flow into any parts connected to the case, including delicate electronics. \_ It's worth pointing out that the human body can have multiple kilovolts on it pretty easily, particularly in dry weather. |
2004/7/12 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:32230 Activity:high |
7/12 iPod causes CD Copy protection companies to rethink strategy: http://tinyurl.com/5ujph \_ I assume there's a hack to rip those 'copy protected' CDs right? or am I wrong? \_ Yes, but it's not always very user-friendly, and in any case the copy-protected CDs have bogus error correcting codes which means the disc is more likely to be damaged by a scratch. Whoops! Looks like you have to buy another one... \_ Ok, I don't completely under how CDS-200 works, but it seems the following would work: 1. disable auto play in XP 2. using some software, select the active session on the CD (to be different from what it would normaly be) 3. rip as one normally would. This would work right? Or is it more complicated than that? I mean if a normal CD player can play it, then the raw track has to be on the CD somewhere, the computer just need to find it. \_ No. When you try to rip it your CD-drive will either: A) Say "Ack! Corrupted disc!" and abort. B) Say, "Hmm, the error-correcting code says the music should sound like <gibberish>..." You need to rip in some non-standard mode I forgot the name of. There are special programs to do this. You can of course put the disc in a normal CD-player and feed the line into your sound card and record, but that has its own set of problems. FWIW, this copy-protection system also renders the discs unplayable on many car stereos. \_ You have to use rca output, not spdif output to copy the cd if you are going to audio way. \_ RCA output is never considered a 'copy'. I am talking about copying as in computer file copy. |
2004/7/6-7 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:31183 Activity:very high |
7/6 What CD/DVD burning software do you use? \_ sheesh, this is the 10th time this has been posted this year. STFArchive \_ scrolled through last 2 days of archive. Is there a text search interface I can use via CVS? \_ I hate searching, someone please just repost the whole thing \_ Translation: "I'm lazy and I want someone else to do my research for me." \_ the archive doesn't keep ppl from posting the same stuff about Michael Moore over and over again \_ Nero 6 on Win2k/XP, Toast 6 on MacOS X \_ How well does Toast 6 do the whole DVD rip-and-burn? \_ I guess its okay, but I prefer to use a PC for ripping. DVDDecrypter + DVDShrink + Nero 6 produce much better results (playable on hacked XBox!) than Toast 6. \_ http://csua.com/?entry=10042 http://csua.com/?q=dvd+burning \_ Related question, what software do I need to burn a copy of a DVD, but change the region code? \_ I use DVDDecrypter to rip the DVD, strip the copy protection and the region code and then I burn the result. Most of the time it works fine. On some R2 PAL dvd's I need to reauthor the dvd as R1 in order to get the colors to show up properly. \_ What software do you use to burn a DVD movie into 2 DVDs loselessly? Free software? \_ I've never done this because it is a pita to get working properly. Some players crap out if they get to the end of d1 and can't find the next chapter. In order to fix that you need to futz with the ifo files and stuff which is just too painful. DVDShrink is good enough for the likes of me. \_ If converting from PAL to NTSC, you probably will need to completely re-encode the DVD. Most NTSC DVD players can't handle PAL discs (and you may also need a TV that supports PAL). Going in the other direction doesn't have this problem, because most PAL DVD players and TVs are multi-standard. \_ cdrecord |
2004/7/2-5 [Computer/SW/Unix, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:31146 Activity:high |
7/2 What software do you use to backup your own PC? \_ snapshot backups via rsync over ssh http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots \- have you compared this with rdiff backups from stanfraud? \_ Raid 1+0. No backups. \_ you never accidentally delete a file? \_ all important files in rcs. this is deja-vu. I answered this at length two days ago. \_ rsync with incremental options running from cron to backup my Linux files to a second disk. On the windows box, I use right now the windows backup tool manually to backup everything to a second disk but you could schedule it automatically. \_ You can also put your windows data on a linux box and make it accessible to windows via a samba share. \_ Make CD backups every 6 months or so. \_ XP box: Maxtor OneTouch drive, and store everything important on Samba shares. FreeBSD boxes: rsync back and forth between boxes. -John \_ I have multiple matched drives. Every three months or so, I copy everything from one drive to another and then start using the new copy. The next time, I swap the drives. Once a month I burn stuff to a cd/dvd. Important stuff I keep in cvs. I backup my repository every other week. I'm mostly using MacOS X, FreeBSD and OpenBSD, I don't bother backing up my WinXP box, nothing important on it except DVDDecrypter :-) \_ I've read that if you let drives spin down for too long there is a good chance they won't spin up again, thus cold disk is not a good backup medium. I've done a little of what you're doing but not enough to say if what I read is true or not. YMMV. \_ From what I've seen this is only the case if you let your drives sit for years not months. Even then, most drives will work (I just powered on a scsi drive that I last used in 1997 and got some data from it last week). Also, I tried to make sure that my drives are never more than 24 months old. Around 18 months or so I upgrade to a larger pair and sell the older pair to offset the cost. |
2004/7/2-4 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:31122 Activity:low |
7/2 I am looking for a reliable RM/RMVB to VCD/DVD-based MPEG converter. Any recommendations? I have tried several found through Google, and all of them can only decode some of the real video files I have... \_ I'd like to know what you've tried. TINRA? EO Video? |
2004/6/30 [Computer/SW/OS/Windows, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:31088 Activity:high |
6/30 What's a good free ISO burner for XP? ok thx \_ burn4free. http://download.burn4free.com Does just about everything else you want from a burner as well, it's great. \_ http://isorecorder.alexfeinman.com/isorecorder.htm is free and doesn't include NavHelper. Same author wrote CreateCD for command-line burning. |
2004/6/24-25 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30995 Activity:kinda low |
6/24 Hotmail to increase storage. Should I buy storage stocks? http://tinyurl.com/2suo3 \_ No. You should sell storage stocks. The amount of storage a place like hotmail or yahoo or google needs is only a few tens of millions at most and the cost of storage per terabyte continues to plunge rapidly. The storage industry has razor thin margins which is why the dozens of companies you could buy a drive from in the 80s is now Seagate, Maxtor, Western Digital, and (if you're stupid) Fujitsu. \_ IBM's gone? \- ibm sold much of it's disk drive stuff to hitachi --psb \_ Sold to Hitachi. They handled they 60 and 70 gig failing HD \_ Sold to Hitachi. They handled the 60 and 70 gig failing HD problem very poorly. I wouldn't trust them or Hitachi who bought it because it's mostly the same people. \_ Hitachi seems to have cleaned up the division. The new 120-180 gb drives are reliable and come with good warranties (3 yrs for some). \_ There is also Samsung. I have one, it's quiet and seems fast, no idea about reliability but I haven't heard horror stories. \_ same here. i bought it mainly for its quietness, but thus far no issues after 6-8 months, which is more than i could say for some drives i've owned *cough*quantum*cough* \_ Don't buy a maxtor. The 120 and 160s have lots of problems. |
2004/6/23 [Finance/Banking, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30970 Activity:nil |
6/23 Does the post office generally sell CD mailers (something sturdy to ship a CD in) or do I need to stop at Office Depot on the way to the post office? \_ Depends on the PO. Better to stop at OD or Staples and get one since the PO generally overcharges for stuff like that. |
2004/6/18-19 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30909 Activity:moderate |
6/18 What's your favorite fanless firewire 3.5" HDD enclosure? I want something high quality. I just ordered a CoolMaxUSA CD-309-FW and the quality sucks. As far as I can see, there is nothing mechanical holding the HDD onto the ATA connector \_ http://csua.org/u/702 3.5" hard drive, this one is USB 2.0 and FireWire. I got one last week and it works fine with my Hitachi 160 GB. Read the user reviews. 90% tool-less, convenient to swap HDs if you want, light-weight, no fan, and space efficient is nice. The one with the neon lights blocks the air vents. For me the main issue is that it uses a power brick. It does use two screws on the bottom to secure the HD, which I think is fine. \_ I am very happy with mine, and I coughed up the extra $3 for the neon lights. Its great for mood lighting my room. Its true about the air vents tho it hasn't gotten THAT hot. I have a 250gb drive in mine, and I like it way better than my other enclosure with a fan because that one gets pretty loud. I don't think you can get around having a power brick. \_ no power brick: See the pic for the coolmax. \_ When you're hard, it's only 3.5"? \_ Yeah, but it's 7200RPM! \_ vibrate at 7200RPM! and has neon light. \_ plus subwoofer and oversized spoiler. \_ Do all the connections maintain quality if you wiggle them? \_ 7200 RPM HDDs can get pretty hot, and high temperatures typically reduce the lifespan of the drive. A fan helps a lot... |
2004/6/16 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30847 Activity:moderate |
6/16 Has anyone used one of the new 10,000RPM SATA hard drives? How do they compare to a mainstream 10,000RPM SCSI? \_ a friend of mine has a raptor. says it is dead quiet and super fast. my 10k scsi was so loud i stopped using it but was also very fast. |
2004/6/16 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30833 Activity:insanely high |
6/16 I have about 500 Gigs of stuff that I need to backup on a monthly basis. I anticipate that our content will grow to 1000Gig in the next year or two. Should I just get 2-4 big HDs or should I get tape backup device? Opinions? -newbie admin \_ Do you need to back up the entire 500g each month or just an initial cut and a small amount of data changing each month? 500g per month is an insane amount of tapes. 500g every 6 months plus 5-10 gigs a month is fine for tapes. \_ Get hard drives and a fast network. \_ TAPE BACKUP IS DEAD! External 250 Gig drive costs $250. Two would be $500, which is still much cheaper (and faster) than any tape backup system out there. Get more as you need them. \_ Just curious, I know the lifespan of a hard drive is 2-6 years. How is it with tape? Is it about the same schedule for both media when copying the old backups to new hardware? \_ No, MTBF for a single ATA HD is about 68 years. Much higher for a quality Seagate SCSI or FC drive. \_ My personal experience suggests that number is wildly optimistic. \_ You aren't supposed to play soccer with them. \_ 640K is all anybody should ever need. \_ Sigh, just like Gore/internet and ketchup/vegetables. \_ The new marketing buzzword is D2D2T, which stands for "Disk to disk to tape." You setup a big raid unit to backup to as fast as you can, then backup that onto a tape at a more leisurely rate and then send the tapes offsite. The middle disk will provide fast and easy restore to recent stuff while the offsite tape will provide long term archive. \_ But will D2D2T leverage B2B and B2C strategies to increase OEM market share at high levels? \_ Yes. It is called the Netapp Rxxx series of NAS appliances. |
2004/6/15-16 [Computer/Networking, Computer/HW/IO, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30822 Activity:high |
6/15 Related question. Is there any harddrive enclosure that is powered by USB (so I don't need to drag an extra power cable)? \_ I have one for a laptop drive, but I suspect the power demands for a standard 3.5" drive are too high. \_ For a 2.5" notebook HDD, sure, almost all of them should do it. For a 3.5" HDD, no, USB doesn't provide enough power. Firewire can do it, but Wiebetech is the only manufacturer I know of who makes such enclosures, and they're very pricey. \_ That's not necessarily true. Certain USB ports on certain computers don't supply enough power to the USB port to run even a 2.5" hdd. This is the reasn why they include a keyboard adapter (draws power from the mouse/keyboard ps2 port). YMMV. Also, powered Firewire is only standard on Macs, on PCs it's hit/miss. \_ who makes 2.5" enclosure? \_ there are literally a dozen different ones that you can pickup at Fry's. I would guess there's at least 50 different manufacturers. \_ http://newegg.com, search "2.5 enclosure usb", or find the category |
2004/6/15-16 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30807 Activity:high |
6/14 I'm looking to purchase a firewire enclosuer online. NewEgg is \_ enclosure, or something French? out of stock for the one I want (Coolmax CD-309-FW). Any other recommendations for online hardware stores? \_ enclosure, or something French? \_ Wasn't FW invented by the French? Maybe he wants the real thing? \_ http://pricewatch.com \_ 3.5" hard drive, this one is USB 2.0 and FireWire. I got one last week and it works fine with my Hitachi 160 GB. Read the user reviews. 90% tooless, convenient to swap HDs if you want, reviews. 90% tool-less, convenient to swap HDs if you want, light-weight, no fan, and space efficient is nice. The one with the neon lights blocks the air vents. For me the main issue is that it uses a power brick. http://csua.org/u/702 \_ I am very happy with mine, and I coughed up the extra $3 for the neon lights. Its great for mood lighting my room. Its true about the air vents tho it hasn't gotten THAT hot. I have a 250gb drive in mine, and I like it way better than my other enclosure with a fan because that one gets pretty loud. I don't think you can get around having a power brick. \_ no power brick: See the pic for the coolmax. |
2004/6/13-14 [Uncategorized/Profanity, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30778 Activity:insanely high |
6/13 RIAA doesn't want you copying songs from the radio: http://tinyurl.com/373ht (reuters.com) \_ nothing new. RIAA/MPAA are already public enemy number one \_ public enemy? hardly. if you're using a p2p net to steal music you'll hate them. i've never downloaded a p2p client. the riaa/mpaa activities mean absolutely nothing to me. i laugh when the motd/slashdot crowd whines about their freedom to steal and their 'rights' being taken away. you noted that they didn't sue anyone before p2p networks or napster existed, right? \_ what if you just hate them because all the music for the last ten years sucks? \_ That's not their fault. All possible good music has already been created. \_ That's not their fault. All possible good music has already been created. \_ I hate them because they are too greedy. \_ I second that. Regional coding, SCMS, all these fucked up shit that doesn't prevent shit but prevents me from watching legid DVDs from other countries. Fuck the RIAA, even though they have nothing to do with DVD, but fuck them none the less! \_ all optical data storage technology sucks ass anyway. I firmly believe that people have only been suckered by the lie of optical data storage media by brainwashing. i have tapes from the 1980's that have been dropped, kicked, left out on the ground, left in a hot car and carried around the world in a grubby shoulder bag that still play fine, and cds that are less than four years old that are totally busted. fuck cds and fuck dvds. |
2004/6/11 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30743 Activity:high |
6/11 What's the easiest way to inspect the last few bytes of a HDD? I want to see the data with something like hexdump. \_ dd? \_ The HDD is 10GB and I've got a 256MB RAMDISK to write to. I want to read just the last part of the disk. fdisk -l says the disk has 10248118272 bytes. Am I doing something wrong? dd if=/dev/hda of=./endfile skip=10248118000 \_ The argument 'skip' counts in blocks. You're skipping several terrabytes. \_ I'll try: dd if=/dev/hda of=./endfile skip=200158550 \_ I'll try: dd if=/dev/hda of=./endfile skip=20015850 Aah, that was a lot faster! THanks. |
2004/6/11 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30741 Activity:very high |
6/11 What's your favorite live linux cd tool for console and network use? Does it have netcat, dd, and cmp? Slackware used to have a live cd Anybody know which one it is these days? (Has it been renamed SLAX) \_ KNOPPIX is your best solution. you can even install debian onto your hard drive with it. - danh |
2004/6/10 [Computer/HW/CPU, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30723 Activity:nil 53%like:29972 |
6/10 What's a good place to buy the digital rebel body only? Can I get it for around $700? \_ Special mentioned on http://gotapex.com says OneCall is selling the kit with 18-35mm lens for $826 eith free 3-day FedEx shipping. |
2004/6/8-9 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30686 Activity:moderate |
6/8 Anybody ever known of data getting extraced from a drive that has been zeroed out? \_ Does it count if I got 000000... back? \_ It can be done. When your disk drive does a write, it writes a rather wide path. By placing the platters into special machines, you can extract data from the fringes of the write path. This is why the DoD has released specs on write patterns useable to highly minimize such extraction. \_ I think the sequence of writes is something like: 11111111, 00000000, 11110000, 00001111, 11001100,00110011, 10101010, 01010101, which is kind of like micro-degaussing. \_ We had a pretty interesting joint presentation by Kroll and Guidance. I forget which one of the two it is, but one has fairly extensive labs for just this kind of recovery that they'll let you tour (at least in Germany) as a "potential customer". Anyway, I thought DoD just physically shredded all physical storage media after use as a matter of policy? Most of my bank clients so far have paid someone to do that for them. -John \_ Yup, it's possible. As the above poster said, you need to overwrite your data several times with various bit-patterns. Otherwise someone determined enough can use an electronic microscope or whatnot to determine what had been written there several generations of writes before. \_ http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/06/09/0151219 |
2004/6/4-6 [Computer/SW/OS/Windows, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30616 Activity:moderate |
6/4 M$ Japan cancels development of True Fantasy Live Online: http://csua.org/u/7li (Wired) Rumor has it that the game featured a virtual version of Windows that never crashed and was invulnerable to malware, but testers refused the scenario as simply too unrealistic. \_ speaking of which: my XP laptop crashes everytime it tries to access the CDrom after it has been running for a while. (so, i can restart and use the cd/dvd but if i've had it on for a while already and try, it is sure to crash). It seems to happen whenever it spins up, even though i have disabled autoplay. Any suggestions besides getting real os? \_ you could try booting knoppix to see if it works there. check out the ide controller settings. does it just lock up? \_ yeah, locks up, can't move mouse curser, suck. \_ heat problem? \_ why the correlation witht the DVD player? \_ CD drives get really hot when they spin up. Try using the CD for a while, and then feel that part of the case. \_ I was only guessing it is heat but it is kind of weird that rebooting will 'fix' it. If I'm right then it's something weird like the heat causes some bits of on-board cache or other non-ROM to get corrupted and rebooting flushes/reloads that memory. If it isn't heat, then it is some driver bug with a memory leak that is corrupting it's own memory space and maybe whatever else it can get to nearby in the kernel. I don't remember what execution layer things like cd drivers run at in windows. I consider forgetting things like that a sign of good mental health. |
2004/6/4 [Computer/HW/Memory, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30608 Activity:nil |
6/4 Computers might lead to autism: http://arstechnica.com/news/posts/1086361542.html http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/06/04/1086203610297.html |
2004/6/1 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30522 Activity:high |
6/1 Clear Channel really is the Great Satan. Hard to summarize, but basically they're shutting down a perfectly good company making a perfectly great product (live CDs of the concert you just saw, purchased at a kiosk right after the show) by abusing the US Patent Office. Go go invisible hand! http://csua.org/u/7je (rollingstone.com link) \_ obWDYHA? \_ Save Howie!!! \_ "As soon as I came out against Bush, that's when my rights to free speech were taken away. It had nothing to do with indecency," Howard Stern said on March 19, 2004. \_ Um, that's nice'n'all, but what does that have to do with the DiscLive patent issue? \_ Nothing, but it is more evidence that Clear Channel is the Great Satan. \_ What idiotic thing does the patent cover? \_ The patent is here: http://csua.org/u/7jg (patent office link) From what I can tell from perusing it, the patent appears to be on any process that does the following: 1) Record audio digitally 2) Manually divide stream into "tracks" as it is streamed in 3) When finished, send the tracks to multiple CD burners. |
2004/5/31-6/1 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30514 Activity:nil |
5/31 In XP, how can I preserve the date of a file when I drag and drop a file from my hard drive to a DVD-RW using Explorer? I checked the parameters for xcopy, but didn't see any options. Is there a way to do it natively? If not, are there any good 3rd party utilities? \_ Nero? \_ Xcopy? CLI dos xcopy? It can preserve dates. \_ Which parameter? None of them seem to be for preserving the date. I know /a didn't work. |
2004/5/31-6/1 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30511 Activity:high |
5/31 Under XP, is being prompted to run fdisk during boot >50% of the \_ I assume you meant chkdisk? Sorry, was in real-OS mode. -John _/ time a sign of a failing HD? I tried this several times, with not much luck. The drive's not making any noises out of the ordinary, and my bios has just recently started giving me disk read errors (no boot at all). -John \_ Yes. Your HD is fucked. dd to another drive, do not collect $200 and do not pass go. Drives are cheap. Data is expensive. \_ Was. It's dead. Nothing of import on it. -John \_ And you bothered us with the report of your dead HD because..? Did you want to hear about the excessive wear on my new ties or how my tv remote control buttons are wearing out? \_ No, I want you to eat the peanuts out of my shit while I try to drill into your thick skull that there may be a possibility that I discovered the drive was dead by some other means after posting the question, and thought I would leave it for the benefit of others in case somebody posted some informative help. Bite me. -John |
2004/5/31-6/1 [Computer/HW/Display, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30510 Activity:high |
5/31 On average what is the power consumption of modern computer components? I'll start with my estimates, you correct/add as needed: Pentium 4: 80W 200G IDE HD: 10W Video Card: 10W ? Mine has a fan on it MB: 15W? Mine has a fan on it How about transformer? Misc? \_ Latest video cards from ATI and Nvidia draw 80-100W MB: 15W? Mine has a fan on it How about transformer? Misc? \_ There are techie websites out there with all this info. \_ urlP \_ uhm, #t \_ You've lowballed a bunch of those numbers. |
2004/5/25-26 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30424 Activity:very high |
5/25 I just installed a dedicated Linux software RAID server with five ATA 133 drives. It seems to run decently. I expect to get heavier usage as people start using it (It's a CVS repository for our office). Will I get much more out of a hardware RAID and/or switching to SATA? I also plan to migrate people into the box with NFS/automount for home directories. Also, what's a good backup system for a a terrabyte RAID? DVD-RWs? 8 gig tapes? \_ SATA: not really. Hardware raid: possibly because its nice to have all those XORs done for you in hw but 3ware is the major ide raid hw card maker and 3ware sucks. Hardware raid: possibly because it's nice to have all those XORs done for you in hw but 3ware is the major ide raid hw card maker and 3ware sucks. Backup system? These days multi-TB systems aren't backed up unless the owner has big bucks. Tapes are almost as expensive as getting a second unit and mirroring across systems. DVDRW? the owner has big bucks. Tapes are almost as expensive as getting a second unit and mirroring across systems. DVDRW? Do you really want each backup to take 3 dozen or more dvds? What slave is doing that job? \_ that's ridiculous; anyone who has important data backs it up. Mirroring doesn't help you if a file is corrupted or accidentally deleted. Yes, tapes are expensive, but so what? -tom \_ Ah yes, we once again hear from the loud but ignorant and illiterate as well. There are lots of small companies that have >1tb of data that can not afford to back it up. They do not get funding from tax payer dollars. They do not make grant proposals for the perfect system which is then paid for by someone else. When you have some real world experience with budgets and risk come back to the motd and we'll talk about your childish notion of "tapes are expensive, so what?" idiocy. If the guy had infinite money from the tax payers he'd be doing 1+0 on all his data, have an offsite location to copy snapshots at internet2 speeds, and do full backups at both sites everyday. But he doesn't 'work' for the university and isn't sucking off the tax payer's teat, like some ignoramouses around here. \_ gee, the university has such infinite money that half of the network infrastructure is still shared 10 megabit! In the Math department they still have 50 Sparc 2s in service. Let me know where I can go to run these "perfect systems". -tom \_ I see, so how does a poor person afford all of these tbs worth of tapes and where did a poor uni worker like yourself get the idea that money is no object when it comes to data intregrity? Which way is it? \_ Presumably if you have data, it's worth something. For anyone with important data, the cost of losing the data is less than the cost of tapes. MTBF on human errors is much smaller than on disks--the majority of requests we get for file restores are due to user error, not disk failure. Unless your data are read-only, you need tape backup. And it's really not that expensive. -tom \_ You're missing out on cost/risk. Not all data is worth 100% reliability on backups. If some student loses their homework answers is it really worth adding 80% of your costs to your file system purchase to recover their hw from last week for them? Only to the student who isn't paying for it. Also, tapes *are* expensive if you're doing enough backups to make them worth doing. Tapes wear and break. Drives do also but quality drives get a 3 year warrantee and even crap drives get a 1 year so you're ok with DOAs and early deaths. And the thing you keep ignoring is doing tape backups on multi terabyte systems takes a fucking long time, restores are even more painful, and you need some *very* expensive robots and software to keep track of all that. This isn't your grand daddy's world of dump/restore anymore. In short, you just don't know what you're talking about which is understandable since you don't have to do real budgeting or cost/benefit analysis or risk assessment. Finally, all data is not necessarily worth backing up. Some data is your entire life and must be, other data should be but it's worth the risk or doing some kludge, and other data can be recreated or it's ok to lose it. \_ Dude, if you can't figure out why tape backups are a good thing, get out of the business. Or your CTO will just kick your ass out for being an idiot. \_ I know all about tape backups. Can you figure out why you'd spend precious money on tapes when they cost almost as much as drives and it could take days or even weeks to do a tape restore? Have you ever dealt with multiple tb of data before? If you had you wouldn't see tapes as some backup panacea. They have high cost and other issues on large data sets since hard drive sizes and speeds have grown by leaps and bounds while tapes have done very little relatively speaking in the last 20 years. \_ I remember, just a couple of years ago, when it was the VC backed firms that blew all their cash on over engineered systems. How the worm turns. \_ Over engineered? Naw, it all went to salaries for stupid useless people on sales and marketing so they could keep up their coke habits. \_ Indeed. Just clone the box and backup to that. http://rdiff-backup.stanford.edu \_ Why would I use this instead of rsync? What are the advantages? \_ It's basically an incremental rsync. All the advantages of rsync with the ability to keep a week's worth of changes in just a bit more space. I think it even uses rsync internally. \- hey does anybody know if rsync or some other tool can make sort of an "incremental blob" ... say i rsync from A to B at t0. i would like to compute the "incremental" at t1 and store that to some "blob" C, which could be "applied" to B [say via tar or some rsync merge option] to turn B into a an image of A at t1. basically like a patch diff. so this way you could say rsync A->B on sunday and then just store the "diff blobs" for mon, tue etc.--psb \_ It depends on your cpu power and usage. linux software raid does use up sufficient amount of cpu. But unless you're running some cpu intensive services as well on some older hardware, you'll be fine with software raid. Just a few years back, the fastest IDE RAID performance you can get was out of a software RAID. As the above has mentioned, 3ware sucks ass, especially in linux. I've wasted a lot of time on drives dropping out and data corruption on a 3ware, but have yet to have any problem with any of the software RAIDs I've done. To make sure you get maximum disk bandwidth, make sure each IDE channel has only one drive attached to it. \_ You should be able to get 20-30 GB tapes running off a robot. For 1TB, you may need multiple tape drives to streamline backups. How big are your filesystems? How vital is the data in each FS? What is your data turnover (how much is altered daily)? What is your network like? The answers will help you analyze your backup needs. \_ What's a 128 tape multi drive tape robot go for these days? |
2004/5/21-22 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30353 Activity:nil |
5/21 What is the proper way to spin down a an IDE disk in a FireWire enclosure in Linux? hdparm (the ATA/IDE tool) or scsi-spin? The Firewire device shows up as SCSI in /dev/sda/ |
2004/5/19 [Computer/HW/Drives, Consumer/TV] UID:30285 Activity:high |
5/19 Screenshots of George Lucas's latest SW changes: http://www.thedigitalbits.com/rumormill.html \_ What a crappy Photoshop job. \_ Someone please kill Lucas before he gets any stupider. \_ It reminds me of the line from "Six Degrees of Separation". Any child can make art as great as Matisse. You just have to know when to take the paper away from them. -- ulysses \_ wtf is frodo baggins doing in the screenshot? \_ Pretending to be Annakin Skywalker? \_ Here's a theory, Myabe Lucas actually is so sick and tired of Star Wars that he's decided to Ruin it so people will stop bugging him about it. \_ My theory: Lucas is just an idiot surrounded by yes-men. |
2004/5/18-19 [Computer/SW/OS/FreeBSD, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30272 Activity:high |
5/18 I have an ATA raid (5), but linux insists on trying to detect each of the 4 drives individually upon startup, which takes a while since it isn't really successful. How do i stop it from doing that? Is that what the -nodma startup option is for? thanks. \_ obGetRealOS.... ok... which distribution? \_ happens on both RedHat and Suse. Am running SuSE 9.1 \_ Is this during kernel bootup or during rc.d/* execution? \_ Are you doing hardware or software raid? If hardware, which hardware? \_ By the way, has anyone successfully used vinum with +1TB filesystems on FreeBSD 5.2.1? I have trouble newfsing big filesystems. \_ i had trouble with freebsd 5 correctly recognizing the disk geometry of all the disks, so i switched to freebsd 4 and it works. i am unable to get it to successfully boot off of a vinum / partition. - danh \_ I was jumping for joy when I finally got pf installed *and* setup as the first program just after the NICs are initialized but before the gateway is set. Now you want >1TB partitions too? :-) I'll share the pf 'secrets' if you need that. \_ Um. is this really all that hard? \_ Yes. Have you done it? Were you already FreeBSD Guru #1 before doing so? This isn't enough: (cd /usr/ports/security/pf && make install) You need to build a new kernel with the right options, change rc.conf, and rewrite the pf.sh.sample they provide. About 2/3rds of the changes are documented. \_ Please do share. I'm a linux guy who's currently playing around with setting up a freebsd machine. |
2004/5/16-17 [Finance/Banking, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30248 Activity:very high |
5/16 poll time: comments also appreciated: Conectiva: SUSE: \_ It is really annoying that SUSE doesn't make ISO images available. \_ Maybe someone has .torrents of them? \_ yeah, i'm downloading a torrent now, but it is very slow going, and there are 5 (!!!) CDs. How does a linux distro need 5 CDs?? \_ Latest versions of a lot of programs. How many thousands of open-source programs exist and are legacy or at least semi-commonly used? I agree that if they only included 'the basics' they could fit it on 1 CD easily. Turbolinux: Whitebox: \_ check out <DEAD>centos.org<DEAD> as a whitebox alternative \_ poll about what? what's the question? what's good? what sucks? \_jeesus christ are you daft man? yeah, favorite, best, most likely to be around in 10 years if that's what you want to vote for but basically i am looking for people's favorite. \_ favorite what? \_ favorite linux distro. Are you trolling me? |
2004/5/13-14 [Computer/Networking, Computer/SW/OS, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30205 Activity:high |
5/13 I just got back from a 10 minute talk by Pat Miller, the flash mob computing guy, about casual supercomputers. He spoke in general about the flashmob and how it went. (Another 6 hours and they probably could've gotten into the top 500.) But more importantly, how you can have a supercomputer at home. He booted up off the CD available at http://www.flashmobcomputing.org on 4 chepo machines and got 2 GFlops. With 32 2 Ghz Machines you can easily get 48 GFlops. Right now the CD doesn't run anything but LINPACK benchmarks, but people are starting to port their applications to it. -jrleek \_ very cool -darin \_ me too!! \_ To the person who asked how this is any different from SETA@Home: The SETI@Home framework is well-suited to applications that do not require good interprocess bandwidth or latency. A large range of supercomputing problems DO require both bandwidth and low latency. This is the first time someone has tried to build a community supercomputer that can be used for a wide range of problems. The top500 list is ranked using LINPACK, which does linear algebra. If you tried runing LINPACK on the SETI network, it would be terrible. \_ Is this similar to the XGrid thing hyped by Apple? \_ Except you do it with random non-homogenous computers. \_ You mean flashmob can connect CPUs other than pentium? |
2004/5/12-13 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30192 Activity:high |
5/12 My work is planning on ordering a raid box and we're considering going with fibre channel instead of scsi. none of us have worked with fibre channel. can anyone recommed for/against any brand of fibre channel? the raid manufacturer is quoting us with a qlogic board. we'll be running it on linux, but experience with any os is appreciated. \_ You will be able to get *lots* of bandwidth over the fibre channel solution, assuming you are going with 7+ drives. The CSUA has a fibre channel raid array that hosts the office accounts and the debian mirror, plus some. It is running software raid 5. We only have a 1Gbit backplane, which I can easily saturate when doing linear disk access. Qlogic is the defacto fibre channel controller card. Make sure you have at least a QLA2200 card. I wasted 6 months of lockups when doing testing with a QLA2000 card. No driver issues since the change-over. If you have any questions, let me know. -- njh \- helo how much $ did you spend for how much storage? i have some SATA numbers built fairly cheeply but an curious about the perf gain if we spend a little more $ ok tnx. --psb \_ About $2000 for 1/2TB of 10K RPM 36GB drives in 2 chassis with redundant power supplies. This was for surplus, unused netapp hardware w/1 year warranty, and 2 spare disks. And no, I can't get such a good deal anymore. \_ Or you could get an external hardware raid box like the Arena from Maxtronic. The low end boxes are IDE drives attached via FC or SCSI (your choice). Rock solid. Cheap enough with decent perf. \_ you didn't mention what os you're planning on using it with. I can tell you now to avoid JNI cards like the plague. We're still having issues (linux) \_ apple xserve RAID |
2004/5/12 [Computer/HW/Memory, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30180 Activity:nil |
5/12 I have 2GB of ram and a server that has 20 20MB processes. I have over a gig free but many of those processes are put on disk. Is there a way to tell Solaris to be less aggressive about putting certain processes on disk? Memory: 2.0G real, 1.5G free, 266M swap in use, 2.3G swap free 28820 root 1 50 0 12.5M 1416K sleep 11:07 0 1.60% dansguardian 28821 root 1 59 0 12.5M 1464K sleep 3:54 0 0.54% dansguardian 28822 root 1 59 0 13.5M 2216K sleep 3:43 0 0.52% dansguardian The processes used to be 50MB but I reconfigured the server to use smaller list files. BTW, this is a content filtering proxy that does a pass through to squid. |
2004/5/12 [Recreation/Travel/LasVegas, Computer/SW/Apps/Media, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30179 Activity:very high |
5/12 Suppose I have as much RAM as a computer and can memorize/count card. But what good is it if the casino uses 10+ decks and they can shuffle any time they want? Isn't card counting good only when you have very few decks? \_ Card counting gives you an advantage. The size of that advantage is determined by how many decks are in play and how many cards have been dealt since the last shuffle. The house has a built-in advantage. If your counting advantage is less that the house advantage (because of #decks or shuffling) then don't play. \_ Casinos don't exist for you to apply your mad math skillz and get rich and famous like some MIT cheats from a few years ago. They exist as a form of entertainment. Some people actually do win money sometimes but (here's the Stat 2 part) because the house has a built in advantage you *will* lose money over the course of your life if you don't cheat. The MIT crew were cheating. Card counting alone will not help you tip the odds in your favor. \_ How were they cheating? From what I heard of it, they had one player sit at a table playing small hands and when that player saw the count become favorable, they signaled for a whale player to come over. When the count went south the whale left. They were sneaky about it, but that's not illegal, just common sense. \_ I didn't say it was illegal. The State determines what is legal or not. The casino determines what is cheating. I never used the word "illegal" to describe them. \_ I agree with the previous poster. You need to show how the MIT crew were cheating. Everything I've seen and read suggests that they were not cheating. \_ If the casino says it is cheating, it is. They make the rules. Breaking rules = cheating. It's very simple. \_ So if the casino says wearing a red shirt is cheating, that's cheating too? \_ It's called a dress code, and if they so chose, they could throw your ass out for violating it, yes. \_ The question wasn't "should they throw you out", it was "is breaking any casino rule cheating" and the answer is "no" \_ Well, actually, since most casinos are private establishments, they can throw you out any time for any thing. They write the rules of the game, they arbitrate those same rules. So, I think the actual answer you're looking for is, "yes". I think the question you're answering is "is it illegal". \_ You said "breaking rules = cheating". Breaking rules. Not some rules, but just breaking rules. So is wearing a red shirt cheating, if the casino has a rule against the wearing of red shirts? \_ You're being obtuse. See the post below -- I think he's got a sane explanation. \_ I'm not being obtuse. The "breaking rules = cheating" guy has a stupid definition he was trying to defend, and I just showed how ultimately silly it was. \_ Maybe we should make 3 distinctions. Breaking the house rules: Whatever rules they want. They can eject you and ban you from the premesis. Breaking the game rules: Looking at other people's cards, changing your bet mid-game. Against house rules and generally illegal. Breaking the law: They eject/ban you and you go to jail. Card counting without the use of a computer is only aginst the house rules. \_ Does signaling a whale player count as #2, breaking the game rules? \_ Counting cards by itself is a 1. Not against the rules, but some casinos won't want you as a customer. Signaling a friend by itself is a 0. It's quite common and acceptable to tell a friend to gamble at your "hot" table, for reasons of hotness unrelated to card counting purposes. So a combination of a 1 and a 0, signaling based on card counting, should not be a 2. |
2004/5/12 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30175 Activity:low |
5/11 how do i check to see that the ISO I have was faithfully burnt to CD. Can I run and MD5 check on a CD? (how?). I have an md5 checker for windows which works for the iso but not on the cd, I could always put the cd on a linux box if there is a way to do it there. \_ Uh, run the verification after you burn, which practically every CD-ROM burning software has as an option? I mean, c'mon, do you you really have to ask a question like this on the motd? \_ nero, for one, doesn't seem to allow you to verify ISO burns. \_ My version of Nero seems to allow verification just fine. What version are you using? -williamc \_ Hold the orginal and the copy up to the light, side by side. \_ This solution has never failed me. \_ huh huh, smart guy isn't so smart anymore huh? -troll \_ hi troll, troll better! that was weak! \_ In Linux, with an ide-cdrom: "dd if=/dev/cdrom of=newcdimage.iso" or with scsi (or ide-scsi): "readcd dev=N,N,N f=newcdimage.iso" cksum newcdimage.iso ; cksum sourcefile.iso or use md5sum if it was complied with "big file support". |
2004/5/8-10 [Computer/Companies/Apple, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30102 Activity:nil |
5/8 To the person who was asking about multi-bay Firewire enclosures yesterday: http://csua.org/u/77z --jameslin |
2004/5/6 [Computer/SW/OS/OsX, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30063 Activity:nil |
5/6 Does anyone know of multi-drive IDE to Firewire or USB2 enclosures? Preferably something that can hold 2-4 drives. \_ http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?id=10118 I have no idea how good this product is. \_ It countains about $800 of drives, and sells for $1200. I was hoping for just an enclosure and under $200 \_ http://www.triumphtech.com makes multi-bay Firewire enclosures. Call or email them for prices and distributors. I think you can find some on newegg or maybe compgeeks too. \_ Thanks! |
2004/4/21-22 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:13313 Activity:nil |
4/21 Do all firewire enclosures for 3.5" disks have fans? Couldn't an aluminium enclosure in contact with the drive go sans fan? \_ Kind of like this? http://csua.org/u/702 \_ Yeah, exactly like that. Do you have one of these? Do you have the loose-connection problem discussed in the newegg user forums? What chipset is in this device? Does it work with Linux? \_ I don't have one. Prolific chipset. |
2004/4/17-19 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:13248 Activity:nil |
4/16 Any recommendations for a IDE to Firewire enclosure? \_ I've been happy with my ADS enclosure (they make the Pyro 1394 cards). http://www.google.com/froogle?scoring=p&q=1394+ide+enclosure+ads&btnG=Search+Froogle |
2004/4/14 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:13187 Activity:nil |
4/13 Does anyone know a good brand for USB flash drives? The reviews on Amazon seem to suggest that most of them are crap that get corrupted after a few months. --dgies \_ Lexar JumpDrive Pro is well-reviewed. Sandisk Cruzer Mini as well (and smaller), except the silver coating scratches easily. See Amazon. Sandisk even makes a 512 MB key that transfers at 13-15 megabytes/second, but that's like $200+. |
2004/3/31-4/1 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:12943 Activity:moderate |
3/31 Grado SR60 or Sennheiser HD-497? \_ I have absolutely no complaints with my Sennheiser HD-590's. I love 'em. \_ Those are $250. The others are $60. \_ Yeah, if you buy 'em from a place like Magnolia Hi-Fi. I got mine online for $150. \_ As nice as they may be, it's still twice what I'm looking to spend. \_ I have the HD-495's, and they're really nice. Never heard the Grado's, but I know lots of people who can vouch for the Sennheisers. \_ I thought the GR80 were quite uncomfortable to wear for long periods of time (> 1 hr.). \_ The sound on the 570's is OK, they're reasonably priced, and very comfortable (for me, a guy w/ sensitive cartilige) for long periods of time. |
2004/3/23-24 [Computer/SW/Unix, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:12819 Activity:nil |
3/23 What is a reasonable NFS transfer rate (cp file . for example), 100 BaseT? \_ How busy is your network? What is on your network? What's between the two machines on your network? \_ Let's assume an unloaded net. The two machines are on the same switch. \_ For unknown networks when I just need a reasonable number I figure 10-20% overhead for tcp, NFS, and random bad luck. \_ So you think around 10MB/sec? I'm getting 3.6MB/s. \_ yes as a *very* rough estimate. it assumes your net is reasonably clean, your source and target hosts are powerful enough to deal and not overloaded *and* that both src/tgt hosts can retrieve and store the data on/from disk at that speed. What's the write speed on your target hd? \_ Thanks for your comments. Write speed is apparently good beacause I was able to cp via NFS 10M/sec to it from a RAID array. Apparently it was read speed on the disks I had previously mounted via NFS. \_ I got around 4 MB/s on a test just now over 100baseT full duplex to a relatively robust solaris server w/ 100s of clients and gigabit connectivity to the backbone from my linux desktop PC. I get 12 MB/s for things like scp in the same LAN. \_ If your disks can push it, I have seen 10MB/sec on such a network. |
2004/3/21-23 [Computer/HW/CPU, Computer/Networking, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:12790 Activity:moderate |
3/21 I have two computers, a p3-133 and a p3-500. They are taking up precious space and gathering dust. Is there any worthwhile cause to donate them to? If I can't turn them on should I bother taking out the harddrives and whacking the fuck out of them with a hammer first? \_ Computers for schools will take the p3-500. No one but an old lady who wants to use the internet will take the 133. \_ Would you sell the p3-500? I'm interested in buying. \_ email me -aspolito \_ http://accrc.org \_ There's no such thing as a p3-133. You mean a P-133 or P2-233? Either way, a 133 could be easily turned into a firewall/router. \_ I dunno what it is. I bought it in 97 or 98 or so and I probably haven't turned it on this millenium. I seem to remember 133. I'm not really curious enough to look, I just want it out of my closet. \_ It's a Pentium from about 1994 if it's 133 mhz. A 233 from then *could* be a Pentium but more likely a P-II. \_ Don't whack the hard drives. Even small hard drives are useful for a computer for the poor or 3rd world. If you're worried about data, boot from a Linux floppy and do dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda \_ Elitist prick! They need food and condoms and free aids drugs not your old hard drive! Think of the children! \_ There's no such thing as a p3-133. It could be easily turned into a firewall/router. |
2004/3/19-20 [Computer, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:12764 Activity:kinda low |
3/19 I bought a memory card from Frys. I put it in my camera and successfully took some pictures. The next time I turned on the camera to look at the pictures, it said "CF card error". I downloaded a trial version of some software that can recover pictures. (It shows only thumbnails unless you pay $30). It was not able to recover my pictures, but it did find about 150 pictures that were not mine! Presumably, someone else had problems with the card and had returned it. And then I bought the same problematic card. It's been more than 30 days since I first bought the card. I would like for Frys to pay whatever it takes for me to recover the pictures, but I'm not even dreaming that this will happen. I'm just hoping I can get a full refund. But I bet I will have trouble with this since it's been more than 30 days. Even though it's been more than 30 days, do I have any legal right for my money back if it's reasonably obvious that I was sold defective merchandise? \_ did you try talking to them at Frys and showing them the other pictures? [formatd] pictures? \_ Why don't you just buy another one of the same model and return the defective one using the new receipt. \_ Not yet. Not sure how I will be able to do that, since I'd have to have my memory card hooked up to a computer with the right software on it. Besides, how do they know that those 150 pics were not taken by me? \_ [the broken merge 'feature' in motdedit is worse than just getting things lost. at least like that people didn't have 150 pics were not taken by me? a software driven excuse to be rude *and* fuck up the motd] \_ Purchase identical (shrinkwrapped) item. Take it home. Swith broken item for item in shrinkwrap. Return recent package to store, since you purchased that one within the last 30 days. \_ Good idea, but the memory card is PNY and I've read on the net about people having similar problems with that particular brand, so I don't want to replace it with another PNY. In fact, I already bought another card (Sandisk) not from Frys. \_ Use the above method to get a working PNY card. Then do as you please (gift, eBay, etc.). \_ Why do you hate capitalism? \_ Because of companys like Fry's. \_ I don't hate capitalism. Fry's is free to have a more restrictive return policy if they like. I used this technique to return some bad CD-R media a while back that I got as a present (but dind't use until >30 days later). \_ I'm guessing you're screwed. Fry's *may* give you store credit for the memory card, but I wouldn't hold my breath. PNY has a warranty, and Fry's will probably tell you to go that route. Easiest thing is to but another PNY card, swap it for the bad since you purchased that one within the last 30 days. one, return, and repeat till you found one that works. Yes, it sucks. Tough luck with the Sandisk card, though. |
2004/3/17 [Consumer/Audio, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:12723 Activity:nil |
3/17 I want to change my stereo and add a DVD player. Anyone know of a good shop and a good brand? \_ Depends on your budget. Rotel and Parasound make well regarded entry hi-end stuff. Also check out brands like Nad, Adcom, B&K, etc. Nothing wrong with better quality consumer grade DVD players from Panasonic. There are a whole set of different brands if you want hi hi-end. I've mostly hacked the installation myself. It's really not that hard to hack on X10 stuff for home automation, so no reason to pay a custom installer if you can afford the time. \_ I've heard good things about Outlaw components if you don't mind buying stuff that 99% of the world has never heard of. They don't spend any money on advertising. \_ A friend has the now discontinued Outlaw receiver. There were some video features that never quite worked correctly, but 90% of the receiver worked well and sounded great. \_ I know you didn't ask, but if you are also looking for speakers, Ascend makes some great ones that are quite inexpensive. \_ Also check out the eponymous PSB. \_ I didn't know partha made speakers! \_ In fact he was hawking his speakers on motd, back when there was neither ebay nor craigslist. |
2004/3/16-17 [Consumer/Audio, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:12698 Activity:nil |
3/16 Any recommendations on stereo installation places? I want to get a new stereo and a DVD player installed. \_ For your car? \_ for my asshole. -op |
2004/3/11-12 [Finance/Banking, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:12622 Activity:moderate |
3/11 Is CD1 all I need for general install of Debian 3.0r2? Or do I need to get all 7 CD? Thx. \_ I usually just get the netinstall cd image and install everything over the net, but I believe CD 1 has all of the core stuff. \_ CD1 works great either way, but if you have ethernet internet access, use http as your apt source rather than the cd. |
2004/3/10-11 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:12608 Activity:high |
3/10 Regarding donations, does CSUA take monetary donations? Why can't We setup a non-profit fund raising event & setup a bank/treasury and give more quota/cputime to those who donate more while keeping the same services for other members. I'm sure that'll really buy us a really nice machine, with gigabytes of RAID, fast quad processors (to run crackroot at night), etc etc. What do you all say? \_ You can't sell services; people can donate money, but you can't give them more disk space because they donated money. (Though you could raise the quota for everyone). But anyway, the CSUA could easily come up with the $400 or so it would take to completely eliminate the disk space problem. (Or they could even use a joined filesystem that would mean there would be no problem, even with the current amount of disk space). It's just a question of will. -tom \_ I am fairly certain some people have more diskspace than others due to 'contributing to the CSUA', and I am fairly certain some of those contributions resulted in either making or saving money for the CSUA. The line does seem a little faint. -- ilyas \_ Why should the quota be the same for everyone? I thought you hated socialism. \_ Certainly it should not. But drawing the line at 'buying diskspace' seems stupid, as it is already essentially bought. "In Soviet Russia, socialism hates you." -- ilyas \_ Er, I don't know if "$400" is enough to get the disk we want. The current tech/vp cabal (mainly njh and erikk) are looking at much larger disk arrays (in terms of number of disks or whatnot - $400 will only get you ~2-3 good sized disks) with good RAIDing and backup and whatnot - ie, fibre channel, scsi, etc etc - at least this is what we did to fix the office accounts disk space problem (which seemed more dire at the time, if I remember right). These kinds of things usually take a fair amount of planning, time, and cash to get right and be fairly future proofed, from what I have seen. Any time, money, or hardware alumni kick in will be appreciated (unless it's a 5 disk, 80GB SCSI RAID array...). There is no pay for play, that just won't happen. --jhs \_ I'm not sure what disk you want, but the disk you *need* isn't anything near that. Even right now there is about 100 GB of spinning disk on soda and only about 50GB of usage (half of which is backup instead of primary usage); reallocation would solve the immediate problem, and you could easily triple the disk space available for very little money. -tom \_ If that is the case, I think it would be reasonable to ask alumni to donate for a couple hundred GB drive to expand to, I would donate some $ to that to increase quotas. I'm not convinced w.r.t. the fibre raid, though. \_ I'd be perfectly willing to contribute $50-$100 if it were easy and straightforward. I suspect other alumni would be as well. -emarkp \_ me too: ... \_ The new CSUA'ers sure are picky. \_ jhs, what the fuck are you talking about? This is something that anyone who has done before can set up in an afternoon. And why isn't there pay to play? We've done it in the past, it's all just a matter of semantics. - Has set up good raiding and backup several times, and can now do it in an afternoon \_ Feel free to send mail to the masses of members who have the time, skill, desire, and spacial locality to soda to set up the system you think is best. I'll enjoy the larger quota and defer to your greatness. --jhs \_ I'll be at the next politburo meeting and I'll offer to do it on the condition that you stop naysaying and shooting down ideas that you basically know nothing about. - Has set up good raiding and backup several times, and can now do it in an afternoon \_ out of curiosity, what is "good backup"? Raid is easy but backup is the screwy part. --not a sysadmin \_ You can do very clever things with any number of pieces of software. A second large array and using incremental dumps or rsyncs (my preference) is easy, cheap, and effective (and less of a pain than rotating tapes) --scotsman \_ How 'bout a little paypal donate button on the web page? \- what is the point of adding disk to soda? i'm not saying there isnt one, but i dont see the case being made. --psb \_ I don't know what everyone else's problem is, but the current soda disks (the TDAs) scare the hell out of me. The disks in the array are probably ten years old, and as far as I know there's no redundancy in the disk array (other than the backup disks, which aren't really redundant). These drives are nearing the end of their useful lives, so we may as well come up with a new storage solution as we look at phasing out the old disk. I'm much more concerned with reliability than space, but I hardly use my soda space anyway. -gm (!root) \_ And wisely so. Why anyone would really need more space on soda is beyond me. Soda could at any moment go poof and arch over and take out the backups. Don't keep anything on here that you're worried about. \_ Dick Hyman is a famous jazz musician. pianist? |
2004/2/29-3/1 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:12449 Activity:nil |
2/29 I am looking for a DVD burner to buy. I want to make sure my existing Toshiba DVD player (2+ yrs old) can read the discs burned by the drive. Consulting the web site and manual didn't help--it simply stated the player plays DVD discs. So should I just buy a DVD-R format buner or shell out more money to buy a unit compatible with both DVD-R and DVD+R? Are DVD-R more widely supported by most DVD players? \_ http://www.dvdrhelp.com Consult the player compatibility guide. \_ Get a Pioneer A06. The A06 is a 4x DVD+-R/RW and is extremely reliable and quite affordable (~ $120). I have two A06's and have never had any problems with them or with the A05 in my PowerMac. If you want to minimize problems with standalone players, I would recommend that you stick to brand-name (Apple, Pioneer or Fuji) 2x or 4x DVD-R media. You can get brand-name media for between $1.50 and $2 per DVD-R, so trying to save $.50 per DVD-R and burning coasters using the cheap stuff isn't worth it. I would avoid DVD+R's since they don't play properly in many standalone players and older DVD-ROM drives. |
2004/2/28-29 [Politics/Domestic/California, Computer/HW/Drives, Computer/SW] UID:12442 Activity:nil |
2/27 I've googled this but w/o any luck. I'm trying to find the mpeg/wmv file of the AOL 9.0 commercial with Jerry Stiller and that rap/hip hop guy where they made a fish out of AOL CDs. Thanks. \- "that rap/hip hp guy" = mr. s. dogg, of long beach, ca. --master psb \_ that's "hop" to you. \- "that rap/hiphop guy" = mr. s. dogg, of long beach, ca. --master psb |
2004/2/21-22 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:12345 Activity:low |
2/21 DVD backup ruled illegal. http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-5162749.html?tag=nefd_lede \_ Still legal in the rest of the world 8) -John \_ this week. |
2004/2/3-4 [Finance/Banking, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:12083 Activity:nil |
2/2 Can you guys see a problem with this? An online company sells CDs, and they offer to give you a download of the CDs you bought in say 65kbit mp3, 128kbit mp3, 256kbit mp3 and FLAC. That way you are saved the trouble of ripping the CD and getting the right ID3 tags, you also get to listen to the music immediately. As a further extension, you could have them hold onto your physical CD for a while and only ship you discs every few months to save on shipping. The 2 caveats I see are they have to only let the person who ordered download, and they can't sell CDs they don't physically have. Would this avoid the RIAA/MP3.com fiasco? \_ Looks like you've been reading Robert X. Cringely's column. -williamc \_ If you're referring to that "collective ownership" idea, that's not what I had in mind. I'm looking for a way to have a normal pay-to-download music scheme with multiple encodings/qualities and no DRM. \_ Any scheme that doesn't have DRM will instantly turn into song-swapping. \_ Bzzt. Not everyone sucks. Check http://magnatune.com. \_ Thanks. neat site. -!op \_ How does http://magnatune.com stop song-swapping? \_ It doesn't. It accepts it into its business model. If the riaa companies had done this back when cassettes were their big issue, they wouldn't be so far behind. \_ All downloads would happen from a central server, and only at the time of purchase, so there should be little risk of password sharing or the like. \_ that still doesn't stop me from sharing it on say, kazaa, or whatever favorite p2p scheme i might have. \_ There's nothing stopping you from doing it with CDs you already own. It's also legal for a company to rip and encode CDs you own. This combines the two. \_ the law is a tricky thing. is it legal for them to store copies of mp3s they rip and send them to you? it would seem there could be a catch if they didn't rip it from the cd you own. but it wouldn't be a practical business if they had to hire someone to open your cd and rip all the tracks off your cd. then, there's the cost of warehousing a huge backlog of unsent cd's. \_ The company would have to retain, store, and be able to prove that each person's physical CD collection existed in a warehouse some place. Forever. That alone is going to cost way too much to make it worth the effort. I recall reading about someone with a similar idea a few years ago but I guess nothing came of it. Is your startup prepared to be RIAA audited once a month? Probably not. \_ If it kept immaculate records, then after the 3rd audit or so it could either sue or get a harassment reatraining order, or else refuse the audit, get sued, win because everything is well documented, then file a SLAPP suit or invoke the Sherman antitrust act. I do agree it will be harassed and must keep excellent documentation. \_ Assuming the RIAA just didn't get a law passed against this, you still have *huge* storage and IT costs. Music just isn't that expensive. You have a one time sale but repeat costs on each one time sale. It is guaranteed to lose money in the long term. If your plan is to get a million users, own 10% of your $6b space, IPO and walk away then oh wait, we don't do that anymore, this isn't 1998. Forget about it. Come up with a service people would be willing to pay for that you could actually make a profit running. \_ Here's a business model that might work: write good, music, play it in a public concert hall and charge people money to listen. \_ that business model works for Dave Matthews, but not for the vast majority of good bands. -tom \_ Little guys can't make money that way. How does a big guy get to be a big guy without a music publishing and distribution system? No one is going to put me in a 20,000 person stadium because I rock at the kazoo with out at least 20,000 rabid *local* kazoo fans around. \_ Your army awaits you, Captain Kazoo. |
2004/1/29-30 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:12013 Activity:nil |
1/29 As far as I know, no DVD-Audio players have a digital-out, and this is some anti-copying measure. Couldn't you just put it in a computer and rip it, possibly using DeCSS? \_ I was under the assumption DVD-audio / SACD can't be read by computer drives. \_ ditto. \_ If it doesn't have the same pit size and wavelength, why is it called DVD? If it does, it should be readable with the right program. \_ Odd. This (http://csua.org/u/5ri seems to have a digital out. Or did you mean that the digital out in this or similar device only passes AC-3/DTS, but does not pass DVD-A information? OBTW, google trivially found that the Meridian 598 does provide a digital DVD-A out. Unfortunately, the Meridian might be pricier than what you are looking for. \_ My question was entirely theoretical, but thanks. -op |
2004/1/27 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:11954 Activity:nil |
1/26 i have a PC. what kind of DVD write drive do people like? \_ the 8x write kind \_ If you are getting it for copying DVD's, wait for the dual-layer burners expected around this summer. With those you can copy DVD's onto one dual-layered DVD without having to split them. For data, the 8x ones are pretty good enough. \_ I like Pioneer. I haven't had any issues with my dvr-105 and my dvr-106. --ranga |
2004/1/26-27 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:11955 Activity:nil |
1/26 Would you sign up for a contest you think you have a better than average chance of winning in exchange for your info (could be used by marketers) \_ depends on the prize. \_ lots of money. of course, better than average still means low odds. \_ Probably not, if there's not a realistic chance of winning. -tom \_ fyi, a good friend of mine has won two notebooks over his ~ 5 years of entering random contests. just two weeks ago he won a $250 set of Japanese anime DVDs. I guess he's figured out what to do with all the junk e-mail. \_ that is pretty good. But what if they ask for your birthday or even your IM name? \_ if I were to guess he uses the correct year of birth, but uses a random month/day. He probably gives them an IM name created just for this type of thing. \_ and probably the same for email address and uses a POB. \_ my dad and his gf have gone crazy on the online contests. They've won weekends in LA,Vegas, Santana Row. Cruises on the SFBay, front-row tickets to concerts in SJ/Concord/SF/MTview $200 gift certificates, a partially-paid 3-wk trip to Europe and all sorts of other smaller prizes like wine, cameras, portable CD, DVD players, TVs, sharks tix and Bocelli tix. They use all valid info, but several free email accounts |
2004/1/21 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:11856 Activity:nil |
1/20 A follow-up to my post on Western Digital 2 months ago. After complaining to BBB and writing to the headquarter in Western Digital, I finally got my $120 rebate last week. Hard work does pay! |
2004/1/20 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:11855 Activity:high |
1/20 Can anyone recommend a good program to write regular data files (not movies) to dvd? Something like easy cd/dvd creator except good. TIA. - brendal \_ Nero? \_ Seconded |
2004/1/15-16 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:11794 Activity:nil |
1/15 I need a small NAS-RAID (on the order of 500 gigs or so) for a bunch of developers. I was thinking of constructing one from parts using SATA and Linux. Anyone got a better idea? Purpose is mainly for NFS mounting, so it has to have decent (although not blazingly fast) performance. I don't care that much about hot-swappability. Needs to be RAID 1 or above (redundancy at 2x is enough). I was thinking of spending maybe 4K on it. \_ If you want to provide NFS access don't use linux. Linux has terrible NFS performance/reliability. FreeBSD is much better at NFS (if you want to stick with a free/open os). \_ Apple Xserve RAID 1TB (500GB usable RAID 1) @ $6K, free kool-aid. \_ I said, you're very phunny. Do you make yourself happy with your little joke? \_ This is easily doable for the budget you have in mind. SATA seems nice, but I haven't seen any real world results for performance and failures. Considering that you can buy 250G disks for $300 or less, you can easily do 500 gigs. Do RAID 5 you'll get more space. \_ I haven't gotten a SATA board/drive yet, AFAYK how many SATA drives can I reasonably dump into a box? If I can dump 8 of them in there I'll get more drives. Also, are there any more oustanding issues with Linux NFS hooking up to Solaris? (clients here at the office are all solaris boxen). \_ There are no major issues with linux/solaris using nfs. You may have to tweak some mount options to get super performance but frankly your developers are unlikely to know the diff. There are cases available that have room for as many as 20 drives. 16 is more common. 8 fits in a 2u box. You have many options. -MSG \_ Our Solaris 8/9 clients have lots of problems with with Linux servers. Only v2 seems to work well on Linux servers. \_ Depends on what you call "problems". Will it work at full speeds with default settings? Usually not. Will you have to read a man page and change one or two nfs client mount options? Yes. Oh! Horrors! -MSG \_ I'm not talking about full speed. I'm talking about problems such as multiple simultaenous reads hanging nfsd or cases where a client writes a file but the file ends up truncated on the server. Even if the clients mount using v2 such problems occur on a weekly basis for ordinary files (esp. for files larger than 1gb). \_ There's no reason at all to use SATA. Just go get a case, stick in motherboard, any cpu, and 256 megs and an 8 port ware card. attach 8 cheap ass 80 gig IDE drives in a raid5 stripe and forget about it. Total price is way under 4k. If you want it mirrored, then get 8x160 drives and mirror 4x160 stripes instead of raid5. Mr. Motd Storage Guru signing off. \_ That SATA/SATAN joke wasn't even close to funny. There's tons of terms you can make risque by changing a letter. \- if you are a solaris shop, why dont you just take sun you presumably already have and just spend all of your budget on a small HWraid. assuming you feel your time is valuable, this may be the most convenient thing to do. --psb \_ This is a pretty good idea, too, but be careful what you get for an external array. Some are really crappy and I've lost entire raid sets when it decided to go JBOD on me after a hwraid unit crash. I've had good luck with Arena raid arrays attached to different systems. --MSG |
2004/1/9-10 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:11743 Activity:nil |
1/9 What have you done with your old 5.25" floppies? Or even your 3.5" ones? \_ coasters \_ Threw them away, keeping the ones that looked important. It's a shame you can't recycle floppies, CDs, or jewel cases in the normal way. \_Alameda county will take media: http://www.accrc.org/what.html \_ I installed a fdd in my linux box and I'm just about to dd image each floppy and keep all those images on disk or possible make a single CDROM of them all. then I'll destroy the floppies. They are not worth their weight. What's the best way to destroy them (w/o using the fdd) \_ Crack open the plastic shells, then cut the magnetic media into a long thin spiral. Then thread the metal hubs onto string and make a mobile and hang it from the ceiling. Oh sorry, I thought you said funnest. \_ They make a fun sleeve for a CD, if you can take the magnetic disk out and keep the plastic part surrounding it. |
2004/1/1-2 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:11638 Activity:nil |
12/31 Anyone know what I'm supposed to do with broken hard disks? Am I supposed to recycle them somewhere or is the general trash the only place for them? \_ If you live in Fremont, there's a place you can drop off electronics stuff for recycling. I don't have the address right now. \_ http://accrc.org berkeley \_ RMA \- Evans 10. \_ Give them to a homeless person on Telegraph. |
2003/12/31-2004/1/1 [Computer/HW/CPU, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:11621 Activity:nil |
12/30 Three weeks ago I accidentally overclocked my AthlonXP 2000MHz to 2500MHz for 24 hours running setiathome. A test with memtest86 showed no errors, but since then, I've had three different disk drives get corrupt data with "IO" errors. I fear this is related. badblocks -w showed no errors. drives work fine after reformatting ext3. The overclocking was done with very fast case fans and a copper CPU cooler rated for overclocking. The CPU fan was turned up all the way. Do you think overclocking damage would cause this error? Could overclocking fry an IDE controller? \_ If you overclock the front side bus, you are stressing everything on that bus, including IDE interfaces. \_ It's quite likely you fucked your system, yes. Did you have temp measurements before and during for this 'test' or did you just figure it'd be fun to fry an expensive new chip? \_ He said he'd done it accidentally. \_ I had this EXACT same problem when I fried a memory stick. Put a new RAM chip in and see if it goes away. Also, make SURE that there is good air flow over the memory (I.e.. no drive cables occluding the case air flow). \_ I fried a mem as well. There were no smoke whatsoever, but it's a goner forever. Overclocking ain't what it used to be \_ I ran memtest86 for many hours w/o a single flaw. -op \_ Really- just try to put in a new mem stick. In general, don't trust software- Its a 10 minute experiment. \_ then what? how to corrupt a hard drive in 10 min? |
2003/12/31-2004/1/1 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:11620 Activity:nil |
12/30 When copying a file from one IDE hard disk to another in one PC, what's to prevent a bit from getting flipped? are there hardware checksums? \_ yes, but.... Once you start copying gigs or TBs around the error rates are high enough that bad bits really happen. The odds of this happening on your mp3 or porn collection are really slim and the odds that the altered bit actually changes a file in such a way that you notice is even slimmer but yes it can and does happen in the real world on PC quality hardware. \_ isn't there error-checking? IDE drives are supposed to resend data when there's too much cross-talk, aren't they? \_ Get what you pay for, caveat emptor, and all those other platitudes... \_ urlP \_ I don't know the answer, but you can do a file compare afterwards if there's a way to tell the OS to flush all file cache. |
2003/12/30-31 [Computer/SW/OS/Windows, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:11613 Activity:nil |
12/30 Can anyone recommend a digital image software that does good editing, organizing (putting them into albums) as well as archiving (e.g., burning CD-Rs, creating slideshows/VCDs) on Windows? Adobe Photo Album 2.0 is nice except it has really poor support for cd burners. It doesn't even see my drive (a Samsung) although XP sees it no problem. I also tried the free Kodak Easyshare, same problem. Is there any imaging software that offers decent cd burner support? \_ use an online service if you're having so much trouble at home. they're all designed for technical illiterates. \_ Talking about being presumptuous. I happen to be highly technically literate. Like you never have problems with any kind of hardware. And I didn't ask for a printing software, I asked for a good digital photo archive software. Perhaps you need to learn to be English literate first. \_ If you're such a genius, why can't you get your COTS to work? How hard could that be? And yes, I have hardware problems. Unlike you, I also have solutions. That is the difference between me and the technical illiterate such as yourself. If you had checked online you'd see the services provide both printing and storage. But you were too smart to check that, huh? \_ Why don't you just organize all the data in folders and burn the compilation manually to the CD-R? What do the above programs give you that you can't get from just indexing stuff in explorer? With XP you can even thumbnail them. \_ I have been doing exactly that. Just that as my photo collection starts growing into the 1000s, it's getting more difficult without the help of some 3rd party software... \_ there is iView Prof, but it's $200 software ... \_ Microsoft Paint but this is only for experts... |
2003/12/30 [Computer/SW/OS/Windows, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:11612 Activity:low |
12/29 WinXP users: I installed HP recordnow and HP CD-writer drivers. And now whenever Xp boots up it complains about these drivers being incompatible with Xp. Anybody else seeing this? Thanks. Does Xp use its own internal CD writer drivers? Thanks. \_ Probably installed the wrong drivers. HP is notoriously bad for supplying the wrong drivers with their hardware. You don't really need drivers for a CD-Recorder unless it's a weird one. \_ It really depends what type of interface the CD burner uses. The internal ATAPI burners don't required drivers, but the USB or parallel port interface burners do need proprietary driver. \_ That's no longer true. USB CD Burner is just an IDE ATAPI drive stuck to a USB to IDE converter (the company that I work for routinely disassembles these things for research) , so unless the USB to IDE interface is proprietary or weird the generic mass storage USB driver in WinXP should work at least for detection. As for parallel port, I've never seen a CD Recorder that uses a parallel port. I've heard of them but unless you are burning at very very low speeds a parallel port CD Toaster wouldn't make much sense as a buy. I also don't think HP produced a parallel port model (at least not recently). |
2003/12/19-20 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:11520 Activity:kinda low |
12/18 SACD vs. DVD-A. If I can only have one in a player which do I want? \_ SACD is technically better in every respect. DVD-A seems to get more support in hardware right now. But hybrid SACDs also play on older CD players, and there are a lot of them available. Go SACD I guess. [above post restored from deletion. plz be careful of overwriting] \_ What does DVDA stand for? \_ DVD Audio? \_ If you have to ask... -phillip \_ would you actually use either one? \_ Sure. \_ At least at Fry's, SACD selection seems *much* larger. Actually, it really depends on the artists you listen to. Make your decision based on that. \_ SACD all the way! DVD-A *sucks*! \_ DVD-A all the way! SACD *sucks*! \_ When I stopped paying attention to high-end stereo, Sterophile was indicating that SACD was more likely to win the battle. I'm not as familiar with the current situation, though. -nivra it really depends on the artists you listen to. Make your decision based on that. \_ SACD all the way! DVD-A *sucks*! \_ DVD-A all the way! SACD *sucks*! \_ time to go and buy 4 more monoblock amps to get the same sound quality! \_ hey, there is a substantial increase in sound-quality w/ hi-end equip. Especially now, with SACD, DVD-A. Not to say I have 4 monoblocks. But if I had the $$, I would. -nivra |
2003/12/16-17 [Finance/Banking, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:29721 Activity:very high |
12/16 Pusan Market on telegraph no longer sells K-pop CDs. Any other place around Berkeley that sells K-pop CDs? \_ No, but do you know where I can get chacharoni noodles? \_ Doesn't Pusan Market have them? Also, try the real thing at the noodle house next to Koryo Sushi on Telegraph. \_ I don't know. I'm just a lazy white boy looking for instant chacharoni. \_ What the hell are you TV magic queers talking about? \_ What the hell is a "TV magic queer?" \_ http://www.snpp.com/episodes/CABF14 \_ I missed that line in the episode. Thanks. Now I have a new phrase of the day. \_ Best. Motd. Post. Ever. \_ Much obliged. But I still want to know what the hell they're talking about. \_ K-pop is Korean music. There's a Korean grocery store on telegraph that used to sell them, but they don't sell 'em anymore. |
12/24 |