Title says it all…
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All I can say is this: jeep… 
Here’s the ring-tone Re-link
Once upon a time I actually LIKED my little NAS… I bought an MvixBOX some time ago, and almost immediately after unboxing the thing sucked… hard…
For starters, the status LED (used to tell when it’s safe to turn the device off or to tell you when it’s operating) was dead… no light, just dead. so I called Mvix for support… guess what? I had none… that’s right, I was informed by Mvix that my BRAND NEW NAS was out of warranty once I opened the box… what can I do? they aren’t a US based company so I’m screwed!
Next, the installation REQUIRED a windows machine… now most people out there wouldn’t see the problem… but those who know me know I USE LINUX!!! I bought the thing specifically because Mvix advertised UNIVERSAL COMPATIBILITY. they claimed it was compatible with Windows, Mac, and LINUX… yeah… they lied. the Problem is the initial setup, in order to literally set the device up for operation you have to install a program through a windows machine. This program is absolutely necessary because the NAS OS is located ON the hard drives provided by the end user and as stated, the app is windows-centric.
But the problems don’t end there! oh no, this crap-fest of defication just STARTS there… next off you have to deal with substandard manufacturing practices… I wish I had a camera right now… because after 6 months of usage, the NAS housing has literally fallen apart!
The problem is one of heat… the Drive housing provides a millimeter gap between the two drive bays, the problem with this is that a millimeter is not enough room for proper airflow to allow the drives to cool evenly… over short usage intervals this is not a problem, but that leads to another design flaw I’ll get to in a minute… you see after 6 months of constant operation the plastics have become brittle from heat stress… and this morning the MvixBOX literally fell apart… what was I doing you may ask? well I was sleeping when I heard a “pop” followed by a “thunk” as one side of the Mvix LITERALLY fell off!!!
Now I tried to fix my little NAS but things got worse and worse, the USB link on the front got bent to heck when I tried to reattach the side… I’m still not sure how it just FELL off when I can’t get it back on without breaking it. and on top of that when the side fell off, the power and “disable” buttons also just fell apart… and they aren’t regular momentary switches so replacing them is impossible…
and this brings me to the last–and greatest–failings of the MvixBOX. with so much weak design you would assume the NAS is designed to operate in intervals, with cool down periods… and therein lies the flaw. to power off the MvixBOX, you are supposed to press and hold the “Disable” button on the front until it beeps at you, then wait for the “status” LED to go out, THEN you can power the device off… yeah… my status LED was dead out of the box. so I had to GUESS when it was safe to turn the thing off… normally most “Integrated” OS devices, such as WRAPS, or SAN, or NAS devices the OS is stored in read only on some kind of flash rom… not the Mvix, for the Mvix it resides ON THE FRIKEN STORAGE MEDIA!!!
This has to be the worst design flaw I have EVER seen… by putting the OS on the storage medium you create an inherent point of failure… think about a PC, if you power off the computer improperly you can destroy the boot record or the partition record. loose these and the PC is useless… in a NAS this is data suicide! ALL other “Portable” NAS devices (I am specifically referring to stand alone NAS devices designed to be portable) have the OS on a separate storage medium additionally they utilize an external cache device. most have a battery powered ram disk that manages the partition table so that in the case of power failure there is NEVER data loss. In the case of Mvix thought, there is no safeguard for improper shutdown and in MY case there is a greater LIKELIHOOD of improper shutdown AND DATA LOSS!!!
I cant wait until I get my Tax return… I am SO getting a Netgear ReadyNAS Pro.
At the end of Nov ‘09 or the begining of Dec the motherboard on my desktop system died on me. There was no real reason for the failure other than the fact that this was the 2nd board that Nic had given to me that had died. Since the board was dead I decided that now was as good of a time to do an upgrade as any. After consulting with Nic I decided to get the best I could afford that wasn’t one of those insane gaming rigs or rediculous servers. Once I knew what I was looking for I hit up NewEgg for some tech porn. I chose the Gigabyte GA-790XTA-UD3 AM3 AMD board. I picked this one because near as I could tell it was on the bleeding edge of available tech. This board supports the new USB 3.0 which has a full duplex speed of 4.8 Gbit/s. The press has reported that boards that support this new standard are not supposed to be available until this spring! This board also supports the new SATA 3 at 6 Gb/s! This is an amazing upgrade from SATA 2 at only 3 Gb/s. The only drives I have been able to find on the mass market are in the size of 2 Tb and are only available from NewEgg with the purchase of a $3000 system. I have also seen the amazing tech demo that Micron in Boise, Id did for their new SATA 3 SSD drives! This thing was amazing! I was impressed with its speed in loading programs, pictures and programs that seemed to bogg down a standard hdd in identical systems.
Along with this new motherboard with its amazing new hardware support, I also purchased the AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition Deneb 3.4GHz Socket AM3 125W Quad-Core CPU. I was going to get the same thing only as a 3.0GHz, however after Nic decided to volunteer some project and Christmas $ I decided that getting the best & fastest currently available made perfect sense. This is the first time in my life that I have ever even tried to do an upgrade and get the best I could in both motherboard and cpu. The only thing I skimped on was my memory, but even with this I decided to get the best that I could afford. The OCZ Gold Edition DDR3 1066 2×4Gb that also has Cas Latency 7 and Timing 7-7-7-16. From my research the smaller the number the faster the ram does it’s job. Everything else I looked at the fastest they had was in either the 8’s or 9’s. I decided that even though it was not the fastest ram the board could support it’s Latency & Timing were enough to make up the differance.
Anyways, I’ve been running this system with no problems other than a power supply issue that had a $6 fix and a usb driver crash that may have been either a Windows 7 or Zune software issue. After a reboot, everything works just fine.
Oh, about 2 weeks later I decided to add another 4 Gb ram, so I’ve doubled the ram from what I had in my old system. The only thing I’m thinking about at this time is to upgrade my video card. I currently have an Nvidia 9800 GT w/512 mb ram. I don’t know what model but I’m considering something with an ATI chipset expecially since it’s made by AMD now!
Well, it’s been around a month since I installed Windows 7 Ultimate on my server and netbook. I have totally enjoyed it! No problems, few stability issues and I’ve actually only had 1 issue. I was upgrading my Zune mp3 players firmware and all of a sudden none of my usb devices would work. I just went ahead & hit the power button on the front of my computer and it shut down like it should. When I brought it back up & was able to login everything was working correctly. The only thing I can figure is that the new USB 3.0 drivers on my new desktop system took the entire usb hub down. Beyond that one issue, no program, web page or game I’ve tried to use on this new os and computer have failed at all. I find that Windows 7 is an awesome os and I don’t mind using it at all. I’ve dabbled in Linux but I don’t know how to navigate in it well enough to do the things that I want to. When it comes to Windows though, I can find it, get it working and have it working exactly how I want it to. Windows 7 seems faster, has less crashes than XP and isn’t as much of a resource hogging whore as either XP or Vista. I know there are issues, but I’ve not experienced any except for the 1 crash.
Faster than a greasy shit running down your pants leg…
Stiffys new barn-yard friend, Obie. His main goal in life to to be huge.
Although he has reached over 1,000 lbs he is still working, or should I say, porking his way up!
One day he may reach his goal of a new world record. Until then just watch that he doesn’t eat you…
Stiffy, that means u…
Slow bastard…
I have been eagerly anticipating getting a touchbook from Allways Innovating. Well, they failed me because it was supposed to be out June of ‘09. Instead I was just notified via email that my preorder was not going to be honored because my cc info wasn’t correct. At this point I just decided it was a moot point because I had already purchased a Gateway Netbook, so other than the touch and the various options I had in mind for the device I didn’t need it.
There have been rumors flying around for several years about Apple putting out a tablet themselves, as of today it has become official. The iPad from Apple was announced and displayed for the press today. I am rather impressed with it, but not particularly by the software options. You have to use iTunes to sync it to your computer and the fact that it does not have flash expandable memory makes it’s usefullness very limited. From what I could see there are no usb ports so there is no possibility of adding adtl hdd space with an external drive. There is wifi and bluetooth but no expandability and I find that a deal breaker.
This thing starts out costing $499 with 16gb storage with no 3G. If you want 3G add $130. At this point they are only offering up to a full laptop price of $829 with 3G.
Although this is an amazing advance and I would like to have a Star Trek “pad”, there is still no way I will ever pay the price or be stupid enough to use the iTunes software on my computer.
The sources links will provide more info and pics.
Sources: [IGN] [apple] [allwaysinnovating]
I was checking out Anything But iPod when I found this. Because Nic wants one I thought I’d post this for his consideration:
“Archos 5 Android Gets Android Version 1.6 (Donut)
Archos
December 24th last year, firmware version 1.6.08 appeared on Archos’ firmware site and included a full OS update to Android version 1.6. A couple of hours later it was removed, and Archos stated there were “issues with the browser” and that a new version would be out “in a few days”. As I was planning on doing the Archos 5 review during the Christmas holidays I thought I should wait until the OS was updated before starting it. A few days isn’t much, after all. Today, 4 days short of a month later, they actually released it. I know, I know, I should have known better than to trust a company that sends a products as unfinished as the Archos 5 Android on the market, but optimism got the best of me.
Anyways, the firmware is finally here. No changes that really matter that much, and still no Android markeplace (though a hack will probably be out before too long). It’s also managed to turn itself off randomly in the 5 minutes I’ve used it post-upgrade as well as refuse to find my WiFi network after it started back up, not managing to fetch time data from the net, not loading emails like it should and go into a power saving screen shutoff that required the reset button to get it out of. As the review isn’t up yet most of you won’t know this, but to put it simple; of all the buggy devices that has ever existed this has got to be the most unstable piece of…plastic…of them all. Half a year in and it’s still so unstable it hardly qualifies as an Alpha release. Stay tuned for a review in the coming, if it manages to stay on long enough that is. I have serious doubts. ”
I’m getting SO tired of people complaining about a certain PC manufacturer because their PC was “broken out of the box”… Normally, i’d just let it go, but recently I have begun to realize almost every time these people are complaining because their OEM install of Vista or Windows 7 came pre-bundled with a ton of bloatware that renders their PC virtually unusable.
I came to the philosophy a long time ago; if you aren’t capable or willing to wipe and reinstall your OS out of the box (regardless if it’s windows or Linux), then you should never be allowed to own a PC. it’s that simple.
Far too many end users assume that it is a PC manufacturers obligation to provide and support an OS, it’s not! Most OEM manufactures provide an Operating system as a courtesy. In truth, the OS is a separate beast from the hardware, complete with it’s own separate legal rules and obligations… allow me this example: I buy a DVD player from Fries and the sales rep tosses in the demo DVD from their floor/demo unit… should I complain that it’s just a demo DVD? no, I should stop being cheep and get an f-ing netflicks account already!
Being the resident nerd and pirate here in the middle of nowhere, I often get called upon to assist the locals in their piracy needs.
Earlier this week, I was presented a copy of <popular movie title here> and asked to create a *koff kauff* perfectly legal backup copy of a legally obtained movie for personal archiving and storage purposes *cough*.
Needless to say, I began with the usual suspects; DVD43, DVD shrink and DVD decrypt. Fail. every time I plugged the disk in the loaner PC I have running Winblows would fail epically and “forget” it even had a DVD in the drive. I tried defeating CSS with VLC and DVDrip. I even threw some handbreak at it and this disk just would not bend! Finally, after several fruitless hours trying to beat back the riaa spawned CSS key, I blamed Microsoft for their epically bad OS and moved on to my native Linux
once the disk was happily spinning in my lappy, I rightclicked on the DVD symlink on my desktop to invoke k9copy, and what did I spot? “Copy DVD” beamed at me from the middle of the menu. “Could it be that simple?” I asked myself as I clicked…
Yes. Yes it can.
I love you Linux.