dell and microsoft

I am amazed at how Michael Dell is using his consolidation software to give Microsoft some real headaches. According to Dell's own web site under the profiles his highness Mikey uses a Dell computer. That is not surprising. What is a little odd is that Michael Dell uses linux as his operating system. Listed is Ubuntu software with open office. I am trying to think why this is not funny . . . because it is hysterical.

Then on the same day we find this out . . . Dell computers is going to start offering Windows XP on some computers. Talk about dissing Vista and Microsoft. I think Steve Balmer will be jumping around and yelling DEATH TO DELL. That should make for a scary video.

Other good news . . . Microsoft will be releasing the Vista upgrade in November or December of maybe 2009 or 2010.

killer external drive

I am making a cool new case. I have taken an old old PC case. This thing has holds 6 3.5 drives. Four 5.25 drives. I have a bunch of old drives hanging around. I purchased a few old firewire 1394a bridge boards. Toss in some RFI Shielding and then assemble the whole thing together and now I have over 1TB of disk space. all on a single firewire cable.

What is really nice is that the drive is very fast. I have several drives that are placed together in a RAID with striping. This means that a little bit is stored on each drive. So when I write a large file . . . it is on four drives and each the writing and retrieval is very fast.

I'll post pictures when I am done. I sitll have to make it look good.


FWIW this is on a Macintosh which has the ability to do RAID easily.

Music and Tech.

Technology is such an odd thing. I recently learned that a new British Naval ship was equipped with iPod docking stations. Think of the past: When I was in the army we walkmans with tapes. Eventually, the ole' accounts receivable conversion was ramped up and I was bought a CD player. My first CD player was mini one so I could play it in the car.

Since then I have dumped CDs for MP3 files. After I converted all my CDs, I only purchased one or two more CDs since 2001. Now iTunes has 256K bit rate music for 1.39 all without DRM.

One of the odd parts is that a Record was popular for over 30 years. I wonder how long MP3 files will last.

Talking In House

One of the really nice things about technology is how a family can use technology. When I have gone on a business trip, my wife and I can use the web cam. We actually like chatting with AIM. We will use some web conferencing software to see each other. One of the funny things is that we use the chat instead of the speaking feature.

We also use e-mail in house all the time. There is a great amount of ease in which we can mail back and forth quickly and easily. My wife can mail me and tell me we need something. Grocery list is really nice. She makes it on excel and mails to me. I then put it into my palm and can use it easily to grocery shop.

Making an external case.

I want to do something different. I purchased some firewire bridge boards. And I have some extra drives sitting around. And I have a spare computer case sitting around. So I need to make some cables. Fortunately, I do not have to assemble a HDMI cable as that would be quite hard. So the cables I need are power cables with extra wires going to the bridge board for power. No one really sells these. So I am going to buy the parts and put this whole thing together. When I am done I will put up some pictures here on the web site.