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My cats are awful at sitting still but I tried to get a shot of Gracie cat playing League of Legends last night. Her cat bed has been right next to a computer monitor for the last 13 years and absolutely the only thing on a screen that has ever gotten her attention is that game.

Since I have melted four $200+ consumer routers (most recently a Prosafe FSV336) in the last four months, I need to put some kind of desktop-based router system together. I have a dual gigabit NIC and an abundance of CPUs and motherboards that I *could* devote to this. I'll probably start with...

How much graphics horsepower do you need? A few companies make Radeon 7750s in fanless configurations and I typically buy Radeon 6450s to get simple multiple monitor support on office machines. I have a Radon 5750 that has about 1lb. of heat sink on it and I'm just going to say that it gets hot...

Outside of Western Digitalness, nothing about about modern hard drives pisses me off more than than that particular form of deliberate crippling. It was one thing when RAID was a deeply exotic technology only widely embraced in datacenters, but it's something else entirely when a $30 ITX...

I've had a Dreamhost account for seven or eight years. I have probably 30 domains hosted on my $100 a year account. Most of them are for very small web sites, either six or seven static pages or a Wiki or a Joomla site or the like. Almost all of them have MX handled by Google Apps (they make...

Crashplan might be doing more integrity checking than is typical for SMB file transfers, which could account for some of the difference, but the bursty nature of your transfers is really the result of buffers emptying and filling again. More RAM would help that, but it's still probably not the...

It's more that water cooling and oil immersion have a much lower wife acceptance factor.

It's extra surface area for silent air cooling.

You don't need a more powerful PC. You need a few extra 2GB DIMMs. It will run on 2GB RAM. You'll just see that write speed will be slow. Which might be fine, depending on your personal needs.

Something that supports an e7400 should support 8GB RAM. You do definitely want the RAM. My FreeNAS machine was god-awful until I upgraded it past 4GB (I wound up with 24GB of registered, ECC DDR2. Thank you Ebay). As I recall, my disk transfer rate for writes approximately doubled when I...

I believe this is the original, mubs. Though I happen to think I already own the most awesome kitty ever.

The Mac Pro that was intended to by my "work" machine got co-opted by my boss's teenage daughter since I never used it and other than that I've always provided my own office hardware, so it was a pretty easy sell.

With a proper keyboard and pointing device and a good-size screen to output to, it's A LOT more credible as a computer, just as one might expect. I actually have a pretty cool multimonitor set up right now where my tablet is propped up below my real monitor and it's kind of great. The Metro...

This is a commercial for Farcry 3. I'm not sure what the hell they were thinking but the level of late 80s/early 90s cheese is note perfect. Cartoonishly violent and gory and there's a naughty word. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnuJyJBM_J4&feature=player_embedded

This is a commercial for Farcry 3. I'm not sure what the hell they were thinking but the level of late 80s/early 90s cheese is note perfect. Cartoonishly violent and gory and there's a naughty word. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnuJyJBM_J4&feature=player_embedded

TABLE. Not Tablet. Though apparently it'll run for two hours on a charge. It's a novelty item for sure, but I can't recall a time that an all in one desktop system genuinely caught my interest prior to this.

That's because no one outside southeast Asia thinks it's seriously going to happen.

True science fact: It takes longer do uninstall the Bing Toolbar than it does to uninstall Visio 2007.

I really like that Gigabyte board as a high quality/no frills option. What are you upgrading from? I kinda-sorta want to upgrade my HTPC machine to an i3-3220 since I have one spare, but at the same time I know I completely don't need to because of how that machine gets used. Odd as it might...

Ninite stopped being useful last week. It no longer supports single click installs for Flash. You're OK if you use Chrome or if you're using IE under Windows 8, but everyone else has to get Flash from Adobe, which means either dealing with crapware bundling or knowing the specific, hidden place...

A lot of tabletop games are made to appeal to geeks. There are a crap-ton of them that involve zombies, Lovecraftian horror or Fantasy/Scifi/Super-Hero tropes. And I'm completely fine with that because I like that stuff. But at the same time, some of the people I might be playing with might NOT...

Asus has a couple $500-ish i3 based ultrabooks that probably aren't awful and I'd be pretty happy with a Samsung Series 5. We're talking about 1366x800 screens and the low power forms of i3, but something that's definitely functional as a computer. And these days a 10" Android tablet is...

I don't know all the people who are coming, so I think it's important at first to play games that don't have an involved rule set or complex set up. My hope is that I'll be able to do this every few weeks if I can get a group of regulars to play with. One of my friends is a huge fan of...

I'm actually planning to do a table top gaming night on Friday. I play Magic occasionally with a bunch of young ladies and that's a lot of fun, but it's contingent on them not having anything else to do. Our games get spoiled often as not. So my plan right now is to get a group of people...

I spent some time this weekend with a Surface Pro and here's what I think: It's too goddamned heavy. It's subjectively every bit as fast as my Thinkpad (which is 1.1GHz faster and has two extra cores) for everyday PC tasks like web browsing and Word Processing. Programs open, you can sort-of do...

In my experience, putting consumer drives in RAID appears to be a good way to kill them much more quickly. As far as I can tell, the only "supported" RAID setup anybody is offering is RAID0 on ICHx RAID on Windows.

Is a used SSD that isn't subject to the constraints of physical abuse really any worse than an MHD that might've been dropped or otherwise had undue wear inflicted upon it?

I'd say it's a good buy, but I say that as someone with shelf full of Thinkpad replacement parts. The 160GB drive isn't as valuable as it used to be but it's still a 160GB SSD. The great unknown would be the battery life, which would probably be on its last usable legs at this point, and OEM...

Completely safe for work but a teensy bit gory/violent seven minute short film that is totally worth all seven minutes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=gryenlQKTbE

I'm leaning toward the i5 myself. Expensive graphics cards increasingly seem like a waste of money to me, since almost every mainstream high-profile title still has to run on crappy console systems.

A philosophical question: An i3 3220 + Radeon 7850 ($300-ish) or i5 3570 + Radeon 7750 (also $300-ish). I suppose the issue here is whether or not a typical gamer-type is going to notice the extra real cores on an i5 and whether they will be more of a benefit than the extra graphics horsepower...

L2ARC Caching for a 60TB zPool. :D

Cowboom.com has some pretty good deals on refurbished current generation consoles, by the way. I don't like the idea of "always online" in part because the time I most want to game is when "online" is least accessible. I'm more apt to fire up something if my internet connection is already being...

Apparently the new Xbox is going to require an internet connection for any and all applications. The latest rumor is that it'll stop working if it's disconnected for more than three minutes. Hope you don't live someplace with lots of 2.4GHz interference, gamers.

Since I posted this thread, I sent a couple boards to Gigabyte and had 'em returned, all without hearing back from Asus, which I contacted on the same day as Gigabyte. Unfortunately, I would have to pay twice as much to get an Intel, SuperMicro or Tyan dual LGA1366 motherboard as I would for...

I don't make presentations in that fashion. I might make a graphic to illuminate a particular point, but my general sense is that that act of making Powerpoint-like presentation is antithetical to the process of good communication. Even when I was in college I judged the classes I could skip...

It's against my religion.

Crap. That solves the hell out of that.

I did look at Rackspace. They were stratospherically expensive. Which doesn't actually surprise me. Openstack is more or less what I'm contemplating. Until recently, there wasn't anything like a local Colo option, but right now I rent 2U of space with unmetered power and unmetered 100Mbit...

I'm not so much arguing as making an observation about what commercial vendors seem most willing to support. RedHat *is* a mess, which is why I stepped away from it as well. At any rate, it's not that difficult to roll your own NAS, but I'm sure Coug doesn't want one more entirely different...

Windows is, as usual, a requirement for what I'm deploying. There's a data center not all that far from where I live. I'm contemplating just renting 2U of space for $50/month. I think I could stick a couple boxes in that and call it a cloud.

I use SuSE at home, but I understand that RedHat/Fedora/Oracle derivatives are still the generally preferred choice for commercial applications. I wonder how much Microsoft's support for Novell and SuSE influenced decision making at EMC.

Hyper-V's official Linux support is limited to SuSE, which is pretty much nobody's first choice for "server" Linux other than Microsoft.

There's a lot of stupid involved in this. I think the appeal of EC2 in this case was the idea of only paying for resources being used, but like I said this was coming from the customer so who the hell knows what they actually think they want.

It's kind of a meaningless marketing distinction since the hardware is capable of being either, but Ultrabooks run full-blown desktop OSes, which means they're going to lose the instant-on/fast connection capabilities of a mobile device.

One of our clients is looking for a "cloud" solution for our hosted application and EC2 looks downright reasonable compared to some of the managed hosting providers I've looked at. i do actually think they want to be fully buzzword compliant rather than needing any specific from Amazon, but...

Has anyone ever put together an Amazon EC2 instance? The pricing estimator is a little overwhelming.

I've configured 4 and 8 bay units from Drobo, QNAP, Synology and Buffalo, but somehow I don't think that experience translates to the high dollar units. I will say that I've liked Synology's firmware better than anyone else's, in spite of their slightly goofy "let's obscure the details of what...

A Mac user I support got a new MBP not all that long ago to replace his old Mac Pro tower. The first thing he wound up getting for it was a USB 3 to gigabit ethernet adapter. And then a USB 3 hub, because apparently MBPs only have two USB ports. I don't think Surface/Surface Pro need a docking...

Neither of my spare Evos has ever been activated as a phone. I carry one as a camera and use the other as a music player and GPS. The screens are most definitely unlocked. They are not necessarily CHEAP, but I do really like Grace Audio's internet radios. They're very easy to set up and...