Hopped online for a few to catch up as I crashed early this evening, and as the thunder and lightning continues, and the broadband cable connection drops in and out it hit me: a few years ago I’d run around the house physically unplugging the computers to keep them as electrically far away from deadly lighting strikes as possible. These days because of laptop batteries and wifi/airport connectivity; my computer is safely disconnected from any physical wiring and pretty safe to use in the house during a storm. I did not even think about it until a particularly loud crash startled the cats.

I still have a healthy respect for storms and the power of lightning, and tornadoes (as the one natural disaster that is both hard to predict and hard to do much of anything about) scare the heck out of me… but I certainly don’t miss the need to disconnect the world anymore. The cost of the wireless access point, cable modem, and home router is trivial ($145 together) when compared to the cost of just a modem in 1990 ($999 for a Courier HST 14,400 baud; or $1400 for a Telebit Trailblazer 19,200 baud).

When friends all went as a group to see “You’ve Got Mail” we laughed about how unrealistic it was to show them connected all the time with no cables; and that has certainly changed.

Many things have dramatically improved.

I gotta say, if they are considering releasing a new major revision (iPhone OS 3.0) without global search, cut and paste, the ability to synchronize notes between iPhone and Mac desktop; they need to delay.

Network tethering (allowing a connected laptop to use the AT&T dataplan for mobile networking) is important too, but that can be a separate application pretty easily.

My very, very old Palm devices all have global search, cut & paste, and the ability to synchronize text notes between desktop and PDA. Nearly every smart phone can do these things… it is shameful that this otherwise amazing ultra-portable computing platform we call the iPhone cannot do these basic things.

Yes, I have installed PhoneView (commercial application) to sync my notes between Mac and iPhone (and it works pretty well). Yes there is a hack that lets cut & paste work in a few applications; but these are essential to any PDA and should be part of the platform and universally implemented. The absence of global search is downright crippling; it means I can only afford to put so few notes on my phone that I know exactly where to find them. It also means that I continue to carry my Palm Tungsten C.

http://rasmuscatalog.com/cgi-bin/mnlist.cgi?rasmus324/category/ALL

I have no idea what this stuff will finally go for – but it’s sad to see it all online.

• The switch from embedded Intel graphics to NVIDIA GeForce 9400M is a huge energy savings; the new Mini uses only half the power of the old one, and gets much better graphics performance as a bonus. It also has two display connections out of the box; which is a big bonus for people wanting small nettop servers and desktops.
• Maximum memory configuration is now 4GB using 1066MHz DDR3 sticks; that is a big boost where it is needed for small servers.
• Firewire 800 port means that you can externalize your storage to your favorite high speed RAID array or even just a bunch of really cheap, really large capacity drives; but you get the fastest speeds available via the Firewire 800 bus.
• With both Mini DisplayPort and Mini-DVI video out, and “Combined optical digital audio output/headphone out” this should be an excellent contender for a media center if you can convert the A/V outputs to HDMI or Component Video and Digital Audio out for an amplifier.

The entire new Mac desktop line includes NVIDIA graphics for lower power consumption and better graphics. Nice.

We have three 1U rack mount servers, each powered by a single core Intel P4 Xeon @3.00GHz with 1024K L2 cache, 1GB of memory (two 512MB PC3200 sticks filling two of four DIMM sockets on each server), each has two SATA controllers, and ATA/IDE with one 80GB drive (Seagate Barracuda 7200.7). Each has an IDE controller with a 24x CD-ROM (note: that is NOT a DVD-ROM) and two ethernet ports (1 GigE, 1 FastE). Two of the three have a floppy drive. They each have three PCI slots and an AGP slot. These servers are LOUD and intended for a server room and not anywhere near a human being.

We also have the previously mentioned SuperMicro chassis (3U high in your rack) with 2 Intel Xeon 3.06GHz processors (4 cores), 4GB of memory (2 sticks of 2GB DDR333 and 6 open slots), 8 Ultra320 bays with hot pluggable sleds, and 7 Seagate Cheetah ST373307LC drives at 10,000rpm with 68.36GB each (the 8th drive failed), Adaptec 2010S RAID PCI card, two ethernet ports, 6 PCI slots (one filled with the RAID card), VGA, Serial (db9), parallel, 2 USB, 2 PS/2 (keyboard and mouse), 3 power plugs (needs two of the three), CD-ROM, floppy.

A pile of old Sun Sunfire gear (V210, 280R, V440 series stuff) is being scrubbed and inventoried now.
Ping me if you need some server gear, lovingly used. You can arrange a visit with the stuff if you like; we are in Herndon.

Fudge, more waiting for the perfect solution…. So close, yet so far…

Update: So it turns out that if I have no need for Windows or any other operating system that is not aware of virtualization, the Atom 330 will work fine for Xen and Linux! Woo hoo! Now I have the difficult decision of do I wait for a board with no graphics or more efficient graphics, or do I go ahead and grab one of the cheap motherboard/processor combination boards now?

Happy Dance!