Imagine you can walk up to your favourite hardware store and tell the guy: “Give me the biggest, fastest, meanest laptop you have. Money is no issue”.
Let’s see what this would buy you in the (Belgian) Apple store:
Pimped-out MacBook Pro
2,4-GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
4 GB 667 DDR2 SDRAM
S-ATA disk 250 GB (4200 rpm)
17″ Glossy WUXGA (1920×1200)
NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT, dual-link DVI, 256 MB GDDR3 SDRAM
SuperDrive 8x (DVD+R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
Bluetooth 2.0
Apple Remote
AppleCare Protection plan: 3 years
Which would cost you around 3400 euro (excl taxes/transport).
Let’s now compare that to a fully expanded Dell Precision portable workstation from the Dell store:
Pimped-out Dell Precision M90
Intel® Core™2 Duo T7600 (2,33 GHz 4 MB L2-cache 667 MHz FSB)
4 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
Windows® XP Professional, SP2 (NTFS)
3 jaar Business Support
3 jaar CompleteCare Accidental Damage Cover
17″ WUXGA (1920 x 1200) UltraSharp screen
NVIDIA® Quadro® FX 1500M, 256 MB RAM
100 GB harde schijf (7.200 rpm)
8x DVD+/-RW-station
Intel PRO/Wireless 3945 802.11a/g Mini-kaart (54 Mbps) Core2 Duo
Dell Wireless 350 Bluetooth
Which will set you back … 3280 euro. Or wait, try this:
Pimped-out Dell Inspiron XPS M1710
Intel® Core™2 Duo T7600 Processor (2,33 GHz, 667 MHz, 4 MB L2-cache)
Windows Vista™ Home Premium
Premium XPS-service, 3 y
17″ UltraSharp WUXGA display, 1920 x 1200
4GB 667 MHz Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM
160 GB S-ATA disk (7.200 rpm)
8x DVD+/-RW
512 MB DDR3 nVidia® GeForce™ Go 7950 GTX
Dell™ Wireless 355 Bluetooth 2.0
Intel® Pro Wireless 3945 802.11a/b/g mini-PCI-kaart
At a staggering … 3280 euro, or just the same as the Precision.
I know, to some extent, it’s comparing Apples to oranges, but I’m just saying: for a high-end notebook, a MacBook Pro is not that excessively expensive.
Published on
January 23, 2007 in
hardware.
Imagine one would have a certain amount of money on one’s Paypal account, and one would like to spend that on hardware or other physical goods. Let’s now limit that to shops active in Belgium, Netherlands and Luxemburg. What are your options? Well, not a lot, it appears.
Computer/photography/electronics
My favourite is Pixmania: they have a big collection of all kinds of devices and good prices.
g(160201)a(1066370))
shop.cdfreaks.com sells blank DVD/CD and printer ink and also accepts Paypal.
Apart from that? Foto Konijnenberg: no. Thomann: no.
Books/CD/DVD
Amazon: no. Proxis: no. Azur: no. Bol.com: no.
Personally, I find this list quite short. Even if we would extend our choice to any shop that does not charge high shipping costs to Belgium, what are the options? The sold product should not be too obscure (no “shop with books on the noble art of patchwork”). Do you know any?
Published on
August 26, 2006 in
hardware.
I’ve gotten quite some response on my Netgear SC101 post (in short: they don’t always work). There’s some catharsis in bashing inferior products, but at the end of the day, how DOES on store lots of data securely? Let’s make this more specific: how would you store 1 terabyte (1000 GB) of data on your desktop?
Let take these as requirements:
- raw storage: 1TB or more (if used with RAID-0 striping or JBOD config)
- redundant storage: RAID-1: leaves 500GB, RAID-5: leaves 660GB to 800GB
- affordable: anything higher that €2000 (2$/GB) is not an option
- accessible via either Firewire/USB or Ethernet (Gigabit)
- accessible by Mac, PC and Linux
- preferably not rack-mounted (who has a 19″ rack at home)
- hot-swappable disks are a big advantage
What have you tried and what are you happy with?
Some possible theoretical options:
- Direct attached drive
- e.g. Lacie Biggest F800 1GB, 4-disk S-ATA: €1299
- meets requirements? YES. Only Firewire + USB
- Network attached storage
- e.g. Maxtor Shared Storage II 1GB, 2-disk: €899
- meets requirements? YES. Only Ethernet
- Lacie Ethernet disk would not work: it’s rackmounted and has no RAID
- Build your own server
- e.g. Dell PowerEdge SC430 with 2 x SATA 500GB drives and Linux: around €1000
- meets requirements? YES. Only Ethernet
For me, the only solution I have experienced to be 100% reliable is building a dedicated PC with a hardware RAID card. What is your experience?
Published on
July 10, 2006 in
hardware.
Tags: disk, external, iomega, lacie, maxtor, netgear, raid, sc101, storage, USB.
UPDATE: also read my post about testing the Netgear ReadyNAS (it doesn’t suck)
In my continuing quest for more and better storage, I have taken the following path:
- Maxtor 5000DV, 120GB USB/Firewire, bought in 2003. Was dependable for 3 years (warranty period: 2 years) but has crashed a couple of times since (with data loss)
- LaCie Porsche, 160GB USB, bought in 2004. Worked OK for 2 years (warranty period: 2 years) but has crashed a couple of times since (with data loss)
- Iomega Desktop hard drive, 250GB 100Mb Ethernet, bought in 2005. Hasn’t broken down yet, but makes way too much noise (loud ventilator, running continuously).
- Netgear SC-101, 2×300GB Ethernet, bought in 2006. Supports RAID-1 mirroring, which I needed after all my hard disk crashes. For my less-than-optimal experience, read on.
Continue reading ‘Netgear SC101: crappy storage’
I’ve been following the Database War Stories of O’Reilly Radar: how companies use text-based alternatives to classic relational database systems in order to cope with huge volumes. Check out the stories of Findory/Amazon, Google File System, Flickr and Second Life. Anyway, this seemed like a good moment to share some of my database war stories. Let me take you back to the early nineties.
1993 @ Ukkel
I arrive at Sopres, one of the larger direct marketing / database management companies in Belgium. Fresh from university (and 1 year of military service), I expect to see RDBMS everywhere and dive into SQL. Imagine my surprise when I see that, yes, there are a lot of Sybase SQLServer databases around, but the bulk of the work is done with something they call ’square files’ (see below). They have built a whole set of tools to work with those and by using them myself, I learn to appreciate the advantanges of the system (speed, mainly) and grow a fairly accurate intuition for things like queries, indexes and outer joins.
Continue reading ‘Database war stories: DB vs ’square’ files’
I have written about FON before (they provide a business model for sharing one’s bandwidth through Wifi). They use a custom firmware for the Linksys WRT54G routers. I have the feeling that current Wifi routers (or access points) cannot offer a good balance of security/flexibility. Opening your own network for everyone is currently too dangerous. There’s Wifi trolls that gobble up your bandwidth and there’s hackers that scan your ports for vulnerabilities. My idea is that now you would need 2 Wifi zones, one behind the other, each having different security and different policies. With access points costing as little as 25 euro, that is not a big investment.
I see 2 scenario’s:
Scenario 1: first the public
- Description
- The first router is connected to your broadband and serves the PUBLIC zone (e.g. SSID “FREEWIFI”). On one of the wired Ethernet connections (the Linksys has 4 of those) the other router is connected, that serves the PRIVATE zone (e.g. SSID “PROTECTED”). Both are in a different IP range. The PUBLIC one requires no login, the PRIVATE one requires WPA + maybe MAC address checking.
- PRO
- * both the Internet and the PUBLIC zone are outside your PRIVATE network, so you can have the same firewall settings for both, and ‘dangerous’ traffic never passes over your INTERNAL network.
* the first router can be configured to prioritize traffic from the fixed ports i.e. the PRIVATE network.
- CONTRA
- * If the PUBLIC router does not support QoS (Quality of Service) or bandwidth shaping, then a wifi troll can consume all the available bandwidth, and the PRIVATE network is left without anything.
* if the PUBLIC router is broken (or switched off) no one has Internet connection.
Continue reading ‘Double Wifi: municipal wifi with protection’
Published on
February 14, 2006 in
hardware.
Since the CISC processors were invented some decades ago, companies like Intel and AMD have tried to follow some form of Moore’s Law: double the number of transistors on a chip – or the corresponding CPU clock speed – every 2 years or 18 months (there’s more than 1 version of the law).
As it�s become harder for average mortals to see the benefits of faster clock speeds and greater CPU muscle, the guns of the great megahertz war have begun to go silent. In the computer business today, the market places greater value on factors other than processor power � on things like battery life and portability and not having your laptop burn a hole through your trousers. As computing devices keep getting smaller, such secondary characteristics will continue to grow in relative importance.
(from nicholasgcarr.com)
Even while sustaining that growth path has proven to be rather hard now (anyone ever seen a 4GHz processor?), they are still enhancing the horsepower by enlarging cache memory and using dual-core processors. The more power, the higher the price one can ask for.
Any sensible consumer would of course ask: how much power do I really need? If I’m just running Microsoft Office, browsing the web and reading my email, I don’t really need hyper-threading/dual-core 3GHz. For most people this was true. Until recently, the only people that really needed fast computers were:
- Creative professionals: real-time audio/video editing, Photoshop on large images
- Hard-core gamers: for running Quake, Counter-Strike or Half-Life on high resolutions
- Research labs: to construct clusters for large calculations (fluid dynamics, drug simulation)
But that small customer base has grown a lot more as of recently: grassroots multimedia content creation has come to the rescue.
Now I need CPU power to rip my CDs to MP3 or my DVDs to DivX. I receive AVI files and need to convert them to an iPod video format. I record a podcast and encode it to 64 kbps before it’s ready for distribution. My kid makes a video with a web cam or mobile phone and it has to be edited with MovieMaker/iMovie and encoded to Quicktime before posting. For this, I need all the processor power I can get.
Audio and video encoding scales almost linearly with CPU speed. So that 3GHz processor can do the job 25% faster than a 2.4GHz. An extra core makes sure I can continue to work on my computer while it is encoding something. Video encoding with a Celeron/Sempron? Forget it, life’s too short. Again, the chip manufacturers and the computer vendors have a good reason to advise their customers to “take the fastest CPU you can afford” (comparison of old Centrino and new Centrino Duo: 80% to 145% faster for simultaneous MP3 encoding and DVD playback.)
More power! Arr arr arr!
Technorati: cpu – speed – intel
Good tip for the Lexmark All-in-one inkjet printer owners (mine is the X6170):
After some months of use, your printer might get the habit of stopping in the middle of a page and showing “Hardware Error 0502” on the LCD display. If you leave the printer alone for a while, it might start printing again. Then again, it might not. Pretty annoying.
The Lexmark support site will let you power off, remove the power cord for 30 seconds (!!), take out the cartridges and fiddle with some encoder strip. This whole procedure might take you up to 30 minutes and it will not help (been there, done that).
The real answer is given by a person called ‘clem’:
Hardware Error: 0502.
On the multi function machine seems to be a coating on the metal rod that the cartridges travel on. Just wipe this rod with a kleenex and the problem seems to go away. Somehow it presents a drag on the cartridges and causes an error.
Clem
(from fixyourownprinter.com)
This works! Clean the sucker with a paper towel (another page talks about re-lubricating the thing, but that was not necessary in my case). The towel will be black (ink residu, presumably), but there you go printing to your heart’s desire again.
A big thank-you to Clem, Google and the wisdom of crowds!
UPDATE: also seems to work for some Dell printers (some of them are manufactured by Lexmark)
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