But does it go to 11?

The Dude wrote:that's the one i suggested. shop around though, i got it for $380

Did not connect those dots. Very good. Glowing recommendation?

I bought an ethernet powerline thing and it works pretty good. Now I'd like to add another one for another spot in the house. I can't figure out what to buy. The descriptions I've read all seem like the same thing I bought in the first place in which I plugged my router into one and it sent the signal throughout the house and I plugged another one near my desktop. I just want to buy another one of the second one (the receiver) but everything I see on line seems like it comes with a sender and receiver.

which specific brand is it? I've never used one. Maybe we can figure out something though.

In other gadget news, volvo has introduced the world's first pedestrian airbag. No, it's not something one carries around with them. It's an airbag that inflates on the exterior of the vehicle, cushioning the unlucky mug you run over and fling into your windshield. Although I presume deer will be the big winners in this deal.

birth control pills

i remember spending like $100 on a 6 megapixel digital camera like 6 years ago. from kodak.

i bought a 5MP in 2001. for $500. Used.

http://www.amazon.com/Sony-Cyber-shot-DSC-HX200V-Digital-3-0-inch/dp/B006K551TO/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_nC?ie=UTF8&colid=1J37AP4TFYARF&coliid=IRVM8TXWQZKH8

fiddled around with this one at best buy. liked it.

i just bought a D3100

Bucky wrote:which specific brand is it? I've never used one. Maybe we can figure out something though.

Belkin

Apparently these share common protocols, so you just need to match the speeds an the manufacturers are then interchangable. here's a single module for 29 bucks. I'd probably stick with Belkin, though, and buy a pair and save one for later. Oops- that is based on the revelation that there is no specific "router side" or "device side" modules- they're both the same and can be used in either position.

..and here's one for $23.50. Commenter says it worked with their pre-existing Linksys, so probably will work with your Belkin.

Wow. One of my mirrored hard drives died. So I bit the bullet and replaced both of them with 256GB SSD drives. It's like a quality of life changer. Used to take me- no joke- about 30 minutes to shut down, reboot, and be back up fully running ago. Now it's like two and a half minutes. BSG and all web surfing is 10x faster. It's like a new computer. I had no idea how much of my woes were disk bound. I just thought windows and the eleventy billion programs I have running overwhelmed my ancient 5 year old CPU. Amazing. And this isn't a techno-rant.

I've been kicking around the idea of getting an ssd for my desktop, I really want one, but I'll probably wait until windows 8 comes out, then do a fresh install at that point.

DO IT

"an SSD drive in every PC" should be the new "chicken in every pot"

we're trying to get our servers at work switched over to SSD. said that the cost between huge SSD drives and raid controlled ones are negligible and the performance you get from the SSD far outweights the price.

in other words, i hope we win

When I built my new PC about six months ago, I got an SSD for my boot drive. It's incredible.

Jamie, I don't know what kind of servers you're talking about, but my understanding is that SSDs, unless they're in a RAID (in which case they are substantially more expensive than hard drives), are not great for mission-critical storage. The medium only supports a certain number of read/write cycles per memory "site" (I'm not sure what the proper terminology is). When the sites start to fail, the drive can shunt data around, but this degrades performance, and ultimately the drive will fail entirely.

A good compromise for business use might be a relatively small capacity SSD RAID for work files, with a traditional HDD array for archival files.

A second consideration is that SSDs, compared to their HDD cousins, are much faster in random access, because there's no physical drive head that has to move around in order to access different areas on the disk, but traditional media are still faster at sequential read/writes, i.e. reading or writing large files. So bootup and shutdown are very fast, as are other tasks that depend on frequent writing and reading of small files (such as web browsing), but it's not a good medium for work involving large files (and I gather you do CAD work, which would I imagine involve pretty large files at times).

Lots to comment on. My day job meets BSG!

First, Jamie, someone I'm sure is making liberal use of the word "negligible". Depending on the capacity, it may only be a couple thousand dollars, which could be "negligible" relative to the cost of the server, the department budget, etc.

Generally, SSD is about 10x the cost of "spinny" disk.

-Anything other than a desktop or laptop should have protected disk (RAID). It can be a RAID controller in a server, or an external RAID array like my company is famous for. You just can't have unprotected data in a business environment. The cost overhead depends on the type of RAID being used. The most popular versions are RAID-1 (mirroring) where you simply buy double the disks for the capacity you're storing, and RAID-5 (parity RAID) which is an "N+1" structure. Popular configurations are "3+1" (where 4 disks hold the usable capacity of 3) and "7+1" where 8 disks hold the capacity of 7. In those scenarios, any one of the drives can fail without data loss. Even SSD drives require RAID.

Then we need to make a distinction between Enterprise-class SSD and consumer class. The "enterprise" class mainly uses SLC (single-layer cell ) technology which can sustain many, many more writes than the MLC (multi-layer cell) technology used in consumer grades. Enterprise class will also use algorithms such as wear leveling to balance the writes over the entire "disk" so as to avoid reaching write limitations in any place that is particularly hard hit, and over-provisioning, where a single unit will have more than the rated capacity. So for example a 200GB disk might actually have 250G of hardware, and the algorithms can flag blocks that are failing and simply not use them anymore. We did a calculation once where the outcome was astronomically funny- like you'd have to re-write the same block every second for 5 or 6 months before it wore out.

Even spinny disks sold to businesses are different than what you buy for your house- the same "enterprise class" paradigm. So the disks you buy for you server at work will cost about 10x than what you buy for home. And the SSD drives are 10x again, so the cost increases rapidly for Enterprise-class SSD.

In short, for servers EVERYTHING needs to be RAID-protected, and Enterprise-class SSD disks are optimal for mission-critical data. The market is young, but so far the results are that Enterprise SSD are far and away more reliable than Enterprise spinny disks.

Also, for sequential access, SSDs will usually out-perform spinny disks, but only by a small margin- so it's not really a good economical choice to pay 10x for something that gives you 1.05x performance for that workload.

going out of order, the moving of blocks around on SSD will not effect performance in any way. That is what happens in spinny disks- the spare blocks are usually at either end of the disk, so block relocation induces head movement, which translates to seek time, which translates to slower data access. But SSD grabs the data at the same speed no matter where it is.

in the practice-what-i-preach department, even my home PC is RAID protected. Lots of PCs today have the capability using Intel RapidStore (formerly Matrix Raid Manager). So I have two 256GB drives which act as one 256GB "C" drive. What prompted this whole episode is that one of the disks failed last week. But my PC kept running. So I simply bought the new SSD drives, put one of them in in place of the failed drive, and told RapidStore to use the new SSD drive as my new mirror partner. So it mirrored all the data from my surviving spinny disk onto the SSD. Once that was done, I pulled that spinny disks and replaced it with the other SSD, and RapidStore copied from one SSD to the other. So I now have the two SSD in a mirror configuration. If I had left the one spinny disk in place, I wouldn't have seen nearly the performance improvement that I have. It's likely that this is now overkill and neither SSD will fail before they're obsolete, but hey, better safe than sorry.