Wednesday, March 29, 2006
The wrong fight
Microsoft Cuts Price of MSN Dial-Up
Why you ask? Well, to undercut AOL of course. Why you ask again? Because AOL just jacked up their price for shitty dialup from $22/month to $26/month.
Then there are alot more question coming up. Most obvious are "People are still on dialup?" "People are paying $22/month for dialup?" "Why haven't they all switched to the $10/month isp yet?" or less obvious, "AOL? WTF?"
Most funny is AOL's motivation for the price hike, I kid you not:
It must be that company where all coworkers are monkeys. ¶ 1:28 PM 0 comments
Microsoft Cuts Price of MSN Dial-Up
Why you ask? Well, to undercut AOL of course. Why you ask again? Because AOL just jacked up their price for shitty dialup from $22/month to $26/month.
Then there are alot more question coming up. Most obvious are "People are still on dialup?" "People are paying $22/month for dialup?" "Why haven't they all switched to the $10/month isp yet?" or less obvious, "AOL? WTF?"
Most funny is AOL's motivation for the price hike, I kid you not:
The move comes little more than a month after rival AOL announced its decision to increase the price of its most popular unlimited dial-up access plan to $25.90 per month in order to nudge subscribers towards adopting its new High Speed broadband service.So the point is to scare people into broadband. Guess it'll scare them away from AOL. If those people don't want broadband, increasing the price of what they think is good enough is not gonna make them get broadband. And in any case, I'd be more tempted to get broadband from my local cut rate DSL (my area has 768Kbps throttled DSL for $16/month) than overpriced shitty content no added value AOL broadband. It does not take a rocket science degree in business and marketing to understand that shaking the tree, price hikes and forced pitching is not good for customer retention.
It must be that company where all coworkers are monkeys. ¶ 1:28 PM 0 comments
Monday, March 27, 2006
How to not do it: $500 TB server
I'm a sucker for that kind of thing. So I had to read the article and come back disapointed.
Terabyte file server the wrong way
I like the idea of one giant amout of disk space concentrated in one place. Terabyte is just about to become affordable (back in the old days, I remember I spent $500 on a 340 MB hard drive!) And I admit, so much disk space feels like a lot of power. However, power comes with responsiblility. By cutting corners and getting the absolute cheapest crap available on the net (and discounting shipping and handling fees) you can build it. Sort of.
Point by point:
- 4 no-name 250 GB disk. $81 bucks each. Not only you get a no-name disk, but only a 6 month warranty. Checked Newegg, they have 250 GB Sata (more on SATA in the next point) for $84, of course, does not include shipping.
- With the crappy Celeron MB/CPU combo, you get 2 two-channel ide connectors. For a total of 4 devices to connect. Unfortunately, once you connect those 4 HD you can't connect your cd-rom drive to install your OS. And if you disconnect one drive to replace it with a cdrom, the 4th disk won't obviously be available for the install, that's messed up. You should have bought SATA drives. They don't share a bus 2 by 2, you can have more than 4 devices (provided you're smart when you get your MB) this would have left the Mobo IDE for the cdrom.
- You should have an OS disk just for that. Add one HD, install the OS on it and secure it. Don't mix OS, Applications and Data. Keep things separate.
- You're willing to build a one TB server, but there is not safety net. I'm pretty sure you ain't gonna play DJ with dvd-rom to backup that much data. Add another drive and build a raid5 array. At least it's somewhat failsafe.
- It's not $500 because it runs Windows. Last time I checked, Windows wasn't free. So add in the price of it.
All in all, to be done correctly, to the base $500, you need to add:
- Extra 250GB: $85
- Extra HD for OS: $50
- Windows XP: $85 - $140 from home to pro, OEM, if you can find it at that price.
Then again, Newegg has 500 GB for $290, so all that trouble of building a new server and all, you might just want to add two HD to your existing PC and call it good.
Personnally, I'll be waiting another 18 month and purchase 2 1TB hard drive for $310 each at Amazon.com/NewEgg, and build a nice mirrored volume in my current computer. ¶ 9:18 PM 0 comments
I'm a sucker for that kind of thing. So I had to read the article and come back disapointed.
Terabyte file server the wrong way
I like the idea of one giant amout of disk space concentrated in one place. Terabyte is just about to become affordable (back in the old days, I remember I spent $500 on a 340 MB hard drive!) And I admit, so much disk space feels like a lot of power. However, power comes with responsiblility. By cutting corners and getting the absolute cheapest crap available on the net (and discounting shipping and handling fees) you can build it. Sort of.
Point by point:
- 4 no-name 250 GB disk. $81 bucks each. Not only you get a no-name disk, but only a 6 month warranty. Checked Newegg, they have 250 GB Sata (more on SATA in the next point) for $84, of course, does not include shipping.
- With the crappy Celeron MB/CPU combo, you get 2 two-channel ide connectors. For a total of 4 devices to connect. Unfortunately, once you connect those 4 HD you can't connect your cd-rom drive to install your OS. And if you disconnect one drive to replace it with a cdrom, the 4th disk won't obviously be available for the install, that's messed up. You should have bought SATA drives. They don't share a bus 2 by 2, you can have more than 4 devices (provided you're smart when you get your MB) this would have left the Mobo IDE for the cdrom.
- You should have an OS disk just for that. Add one HD, install the OS on it and secure it. Don't mix OS, Applications and Data. Keep things separate.
- You're willing to build a one TB server, but there is not safety net. I'm pretty sure you ain't gonna play DJ with dvd-rom to backup that much data. Add another drive and build a raid5 array. At least it's somewhat failsafe.
- It's not $500 because it runs Windows. Last time I checked, Windows wasn't free. So add in the price of it.
All in all, to be done correctly, to the base $500, you need to add:
- Extra 250GB: $85
- Extra HD for OS: $50
- Windows XP: $85 - $140 from home to pro, OEM, if you can find it at that price.
Then again, Newegg has 500 GB for $290, so all that trouble of building a new server and all, you might just want to add two HD to your existing PC and call it good.
Personnally, I'll be waiting another 18 month and purchase 2 1TB hard drive for $310 each at Amazon.com/NewEgg, and build a nice mirrored volume in my current computer. ¶ 9:18 PM 0 comments
