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» How higher RPM hard drives rip you off | George Ou | ZDNet.com

malliemcg — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 00:37:16 +0000

» How higher RPM hard drives rip you off | George Ou | ZDNet.com

A very interesting article dealing with a solution to the percieved slowness of lower RPM HDD’s and how to improve the partitioning scheme to have the OS run faster, and large non frequent seeking scenarios for the slower parts of the HDD.

The 12-Drive RAID Storage Box

malliemcg — Sun, 24 Sep 2006 09:43:44 +0000

The 12-Drive RAID Storage Box

Now I’m having storage issues, if this unit had a GigE NIC on the back of it, and sweet management interface, I’d be very happy man running around trying to get on. Solaris + ZFS that would allow for any number of discs being shoved into at any point would be pure gravy!

Inventgeek.com – 0dBA Ionic Cooling Gaming System – Overview

malliemcg — Sun, 24 Sep 2006 04:19:22 +0000

Inventgeek.com – 0dBA Ionic Cooling Gaming System – Overview

Woah! I wants a most impressive cooling system.

Who says size does not matter : Apple – MacBook Pro

malliemcg — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 21:57:22 +0000

Apple – MacBook Pro

Apple have finally announced the MacBook Pro 17″ model – with Spec’s very similar to the 15″ and that lucious 17″ screen. $4600(AUD) is where it starts for this capable machine but I would make the following changes: Drop the ram to 1GB (2×512SIMMS) (subtract $155 – then purchase 2x Kingston 1GB modules for $440 (220 ea)) to upgrade this box, and I’d go with the 7200rpm HDD for the reduced latency and extra speed over the 120GB 5400rpm model.

13.3-inch MacBooks on the way?

malliemcg — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 02:35:49 +0000

We’ve been operating under the assumption that Apple will call their new consumer line of laptops MacBook, as opposed to the pro line of MacBook Pro. Maybe we just spend too much time thinking about Apple’s naming schemes, and this probably doesn’t change anything.

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These look seriously tempting and will be most temping if they can play WoW reasonably well.

read more | digg story

Linux wireless hardware support search site

malliemcg — Tue, 04 Apr 2006 22:37:20 +0000

Will my wireless usb/card device will work under Linux?, sure there are a lot of resources but this simple and straight to the point site will make things a lot easier, hey you can contribute and make it even better.

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Makes choosing a wireless device for use within linux easier. (Hint: Avoid Broadcom based chipsets)

read more | digg story

Reasons to Love Open-Source DRM

malliemcg — Tue, 04 Apr 2006 02:56:31 +0000

Sun Microsystems is pushing an open-source copy protection scheme designed to let you listen to your music across a broad range of platforms. Critics say there’s no such thing as good DRM. Here’s why they’re wrong

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For as long as companies persist in shoving DRM down our throats a DRM system like the one described here, proposed by Sun is most certainly my preferred method.

read more | digg story

The pace of technology

malliemcg — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 03:10:29 +0000

After penning this article I realised that it was nearly 10 years ago that I first discussed with fellow students the posibility and the rumors that Sun were investigating placing multiple chips into a single die, and that we now have this technology. It seems like there is some significant lag between things that are thought up or spoken of and they are implemented. What is the relevance of this you may ask yourself? – Simple – some of the more amazing, radical or off the wall ideas that people are coming up with have the potential to be implemented in real life down the track, providing of course there are people who believe it can be done and work towards it. Mad props to Sun’s engineers for this one!

How to build your own powerbook in 2 minutes

malliemcg — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 01:47:33 +0000

I made a video demonstrating the upgrade and reassembly of an Apple 12″ Powerbook G4. Upgrades include a 16X Dual Layer DVD burner, a 100GB hard drive, new speakers with a louder bass response, and a new Apple rainbow logo on the lid. All of this in about a minute and a half! Check it out and let me know what you think.

read more | digg story

AnandTech: Sun’s T2000 “Coolthreads” Server: First Impressions and Experiences

malliemcg — Mon, 27 Mar 2006 22:47:42 +0000

AnandTech: Sun’s T2000 “Coolthreads” Server: First Impressions and Experiences

An interesting article regarding the T2000 from Sun running Solaris 10. (This CPU is an 8 core 32 thread processor that consumes ~ 72W). This machine even with a 1GHz CPU is still capable of keeping up (or near) to a quad core opteron server. Some other issues that people in data centres might not care about that were not mentioned (but i do) are the noise levels generated by this machine. Seeing as the base model is only $5000 AUD, it is rather tempting to get one of these to act as file, web etal (JOAT server [jack of all trades]) especially considering the capabilities of zoning in Solaris.

It is nice to see that Sun are not oblivious to the flaws in this CPU however (light FPU usage 1.5-3.0%) in its current incarnation can somewhat cripple its performance, to remedy this rather than one FPU per CPU, Sun look to be incorporating one FPU unit per core.

I would like to have a play with one of these for a month or so – I am most interested to see how this machine would perform as *AMP server (*=OS, Apache, MySQL and PHP) combined with file server and firewall (allow, limit and monitor the flatmate’s internet connetion) seems to be a sweet solution. If anyone from Sun is here please let me know if I can have one for a month .

From a work perspective, I would love to see how one of these would handle enterprise java applications especially when loaded with ram and many simultaneous connections, this would truly be enlightning.

If you are from Sun and happen to stumble upon this, please let me know, if you have one of these and are prepared to set up a Zone that is locked down to allow me to experiment, I would be most grateful!