HI SYN!

Legacy free mobo!?!

A while ago I was wondering when I'd finally see a legacy free motherboard and I will admit it took longer than I expected. Admittedly, I haven't searched for new hardware in a while and I rarely read the hardware sites as I was/am fairly content with what I had. However, since my Q6600 is super heating my office room at my new apartment I'm in the market for changing out that CPU for something new (E8500 is in the lead thus far).

While doing my research, I stumbled upon the Intel BOXDP35DPM motherboard while checking out what motherboards are out there now.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813121314

It's completely legacy free! Some would say that not having PS2 ports would be a drawback but I say good riddance! It even has an eSATA port! If I had $400 to drop this second I'd get this, an E8500 and 8GB of DDR2 memory and have my 'ultimate workstation' that I'm not sure I'd ever need to upgrade.

I've complained in the past that tech has stayed overly expensive and just seems to get bigger and hotter, but I think we're finally at the point where advancements for upgrades are coming down to smaller, cooler, lower power consumption and cheaper is where it's at -- I've been waiting for this day for years!

I wonder if i have anything I could sell that would equal up to $400... hmmmm.....

colo vs dedicated server

I've been shopping around the past few days for either a colocated server space for an old box I have (AMD 64 4000, 4GB memory, 300GB HD) or a deal on a dedicated server.  I've pretty much decided on going with Burst.net unless one of my recent quotes come back with a great deal since I cannot stand spending $50/mo on a Celeron with 512MB memory and 80GB HD vs what I can get for $70/mo. There is an interesting thread on WHT that I stumbled upon dealing with the question of why cheap colo costs more than cheap dedicated:

This is probably a dumb question, but I've been curious about something. While shopping around for either a cheap dedicated server (less than $75/mo) or a cheap colo for a 1u server, I have noticed that the cheap dedicated servers are often less than a cheap colo, which seems odd to me since with a colo you bring your own machine. For example, Sago Networks has cheap dedicateds for $50, $59, $79 etc. yet their cheapest colo option is $99. For Sago's $50 dedicated you get 1000GB transfer and 2 IP's, and with their $99 colo you get only get 100 GB transfer and 1 IP. And Sago is not unusual in this respect. I've priced other providers that fall into this category and they have similar differences. So why is colo more expensive than dedicated for similar, if not lower, features?

Read the rest

The reason I'm going to a dedicated/colo server (again!) is because this VPS has proven too unstable for me.  I can't deal with my sites being up and down or painfully slow because another VPS is eating up all of the hosts CPU. Plus I can't run any game servers for fun!  I also will get about 10x the server for 2.5x the cost which I think is a good deal and I get to put some of my old, idle hardware into action.  This decisions seems Win-Win for everyone.

Short and sweet: My Wii!

I got a Wii yesterday and to my surprise this is the platform I've been desiring (and trying to build myself) that fills my needs for a low power platform. Unlike the PS3, it allows image viewing off a SD card (not mention it plays music and some video playback off the SD card). I found an app called "Media Center X" a couple of weeks ago while looking around for a way to stream mp3s to a PS3 for a friend and it also works for the Wii. Once I'm able to install Media Center X on my CentOS server and give this a go I should know fairly quickly if this is truely my low power (10W-17W) killer Media Center App! more later...

The hunt for "Legacy Free"

As some of my friends know, a huge pet peeve of mine about computers is legacy ports. So while searching for some information on Linux's bluetooth support and trying to find out what motherboards/SFF systems have bluetooth support I stumbled upon this post on Slashdot: As time goes by, more and more ports/connectors add up on my motherboards. When are we going to get ride of ps/2 buses, parallels and serial ports? So now we would have: bluetooth parallel port serial ports Serial IDE Parallel IDE Firewire ps2 buses USB -- Next ones are not on motherboards, but still...--- Analog joystick port (gameport) VGA output Audio ports Ethernet Am I missing a port? Keeping legacy ports does add cost on the systems... I wish we could go by with firewire only. Everything on firewire. HDs, modem, joystick, keyboard... Only analog output like Video and Audio would remain. BTW, most motherboards do not come with Firewire on, but I bet there must be a few out there with it. Source: Link [~half way down the page] This was made back in 2002, so I'm glad to see a bulk of people were thinking the same way I am even back then. My ideal motherboard would consist of ports for the following: - SATA2 - eSATA port - USB 2.0 - Firewire - 1Gbit NIC - Bluetooth support With possible variations containing wireless instead of the 1Gb NIC and both the NIC and wireless. This is on top of the usual CPU, memory and chipsets that go on the board. The idea here is to mimize space required, cost and power required. Power consumption is something I'm becoming more and more aware of and trying to minimize my personal power footprint for both cost and ecological reasons. And what exactly do I mean by "legacy"? Parallel Port - Original IBM PC Serial Port - Original IBM PC Game Port - Orignal IBM PC PS/2 Mouse - IBM PS/2 PS/2 Keyboard - IBM PS/2 3.5" Floppy - IBM PS/2 PATA (IDE) - Compaq (1985) PCI Slots - Intel 1992 AGP Slots - Intel 1997 The PCI Slot is the only slot I would consider okay to keep, but even then I need to look into this more, I bet you can get rid of it and survive. The AGP slot 'just' came out in 1997, and I remember that well since I saw beta boards with it on and thought it was the coolest thing since a GUI on an OS.