"Err"?

What is the meaning of the acronym "RAID"?

There are times when the cheap solution is preferable.

Yes, you're right: I'm cheap. I want to run a small network in my SOHO that doesn't cost me about $25,000 in licensing fees to M$.

Imagine that!

I did not say anything about your ability to put together a PC.

In fact I am saying - Hey dude I got duped into buying ECS motherboards too. It may not be the O/S, those boards suck! Lets not buy those again.

You are overly sensitive and lash out by reflex, why?

Nice play on my POS description. Of course my POS means - Piece of Sh!t.

So, you're ceding all of modern art, in effect, to the left?

Enjoy your homo-erotic Maplethorpes and crosses in urine. Modern art is crap.

Not sure if we need someone like you on our team.

"Our team"?

There are times when the cheap solution is preferable.

It has been my experience (and others will probably agree) that going cheap results in nothing but problems. Defective hardware. Crappy drivers. Etc, etc.

I agree!

I hate the cost of MS especially for Enterprise solutions. I hope Linux forces the prices down.

I am all for free markets and welcome anyone that challenges MS. It is always better for the consumer.

Still W2K is stable.

Have you seen the cost for MS Office Professional!!??? Sheez, pass me a heart attack.

Interesting. Who pulled out besdies Hewlett-Packard?

Hewlett Packard is a company in need of direction. After their acquisition of part of DEC and their merger with Compaq, they now have several competing technologies and stakes in several competing operating systems.

Ten years ago H-P was the number one Unix database platform. If you wanted to run Oracle or Informix, HP-UX was the leader. Secondarily DB2 on AIX, and thirdly SunOS. Around the 1995-1996, however, H-P announced that they were going to end-of-life all their PA-RISC chip fabrication as well as their HP-UX AT&T unix derivative. The announcement was timed with Intel's announcement that Merced was nearing production, and the also announced that they were going to standardize on an Intel Unix, such as SCO or Solaris on Intel.

Within one year of that announcement, H-P publically retrated the announcement due to angry protests from their customer base. However, reversing themselves didn't help. Withing another two years, IBM and Sun had both surpassed H-P as a database platform, and MS SQL Server made some in-roads into the smaller end of the market. Since then, H-P has never recaptured the market lead it lost. They still make good office products, but their server product offerings never commanded the market share they once did.

Fast forward eight and we have H-P buying the Alpha CISC processor and fabrication plants from DEC, while DEC's personal computer business is bought by Compaq. When H-P merged with Compaq/DEC they ended up with two totally different and competing 64-bit CPU technologies, PA-RISC and Alpha (CISC), as well as three totally differnent operating systems, their own HP-UX and OSF1 or Tru64 or whatever it is being called this week, as well as DEC-VMS.

The long and the short of this is that H-P is competing with itself on a variety of fronts, and they should do well to remember the mistakes of the past. I would be very suprised if they were to be able to successfully integrate all their different lines as well as IBM has over the years. IBM offers a variet of products and platforms, but they've never been fractured as H-P's current lines are. H-P will sell you PA-RISC boxes, Alpha boxes, Xeon, and now Itanium-based servers. Recently, they've ported HP-UX to the Itanium, and they still support Netware and VMS.

I think they have some good products, but it is very difficult to be all things to all people. They advertise support for Linux on Alpha, Xeon, and Itanium, yet at the same time pull out of this trade show? Sun, IBM, Microsoft and Intel have all done some brain dead things at one time or another. H-P's problem seems to stem from a lack of focus or direction. To their credit, they have also announced a migration path off of the dated Alpha towards Itanium, including Itanium support for VMS!

Strange days.

I found that Cheap works sometimes.

Just not enough to warrant ever going back.

Quality parts make my day.

The Redmond, Wash.-based software giant is courting government officials, donating money to educational projects, and investing in joint ventures with local companies, said Jun Tang, president of Microsoft China.

Pot, meet kettle.

Must all members agree with you on O/S, Software and Art?

I didn't say "agree with me." I said that we don't need people on our "team" who are willing to allow the Left to have control over all art.

Yeah, but... has anyone used that Tablet PC that Gateway's advertising? I've been trying to find the Toshiba Portege to test-drive it, but no one has it. Dan

I, too, thought it was my MB. It wasn't; it was the memory. So it might be that XP got booted OFF my machine too hastily; but now that I have Red Hat 8.0 plus Win4Lin (which allows Win32 apps to run on the Linux desktop), I'm not going to worry about it any more.

BTW, I have heard that the problem with the ECS boards--quite a few of which have "issues," I'll agree--is really with those using the SiS chipset (as opposed to VIA). What is your experience?

I've been using a W2KPro box for about a year now; haven't managed to blue-screen it yet (and Lord knows I've tried).

Any NSA hack that recommends Microsoft products has rocks in his head IMHO... Military/government computer administrators make mistakes too.

As I recall a Microsoft NT flaw "crashed" an entire warship during a wargame... Ah, those poor souls who stray from IBM Federal Systems Division...

The threat I speak of is not to the internal military networks, which hopefully are all battened down and isolated pretty well... it is to the United States economic and industrial base. Don't try to tell me that the NSA sanctions Microsoft software because it lends itself to a more secure National information infrastructure...what it lends itself to is as a platform for remote administration trojans and denial of service attacks...

Isn't it amazing how Mac and Linux users are the only ones who can't seem to keep Windows running?

Yeah, it must be the fault-tolerance. Linux and Mac users expect things to run perfectly, and Winders simply doesn't do that.

Great point.

The SiS chipset does seem to be the culprit, though I have had issues with ECS w\VIA, not nearly on the same level.

I am not going to try and talk you out of Linux. I have no issues with Linux per say. In fact I am considering a Linux Server solution for a client.

I just think it has become a fad to bash MS products as a whole and I have had overall good experiences with W2K and decent experiences with W98 (can be made to run stable...some work and diligence with installs, never will use as a Business solution though).

I certainly hope Linux forces MS to consider the consumer more. (I am not moving to XP on principle).

The NSA has given guidelines for securing Information Systems.

They are not making recommendations, they are working within the most prevalent software and operating systems.

Guidelines that had they been followed would have prevented the attack of last weekend.

What O/S was hacked to cause the first major Internet crash? hint: not a MS product.

Did nameservers go down last weekend? What O/S are running those?

Quality really is important. I recall some of the really lower end motherboards were put together with some cheap capacitors (mylar most likely). They worked fine for the first year or two. Then the caps would outgas and start failing in really subtle ways. All the good boards have high quality caps, usually tantalum.

I've been running my homebuilt ABIT BP6 with dual matched Celeron 366 MHz overclocked to 550MHz for about three years now. Runs 24/7 and is pretty stable except it occasionally burps when it overheats (even though it has about 8 fans ;)

The ABIT board is a true work of art...(runs Linux RedHat configured for symetric multiprocessing, of course: is faster than our $25000 SUN which we bought just five years ago)

NT has a different kernel then other MS-Windoz offerings, but DOS is still there sitting under it. You can still pull up a DOS prompt scren in NT.