* Posts by Tim99

2002 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2008

iPad alert: Are you a selfish elite or an independent geek?

Tim99 Silver badge
Grenade

Click Tarts

A quote from the orginal MyType authors' website: "MyType is a personality based social networking application that allows you to explore your personality using several popular personality assessments such as the Jung Typology and and a survey with questions drawn from the International Personality Item Pool. Please keep in mind that MyType is an entertainment service and is in no way a substitute for the services of a psychological professional. You come to MyType to have fun and, perhaps, to learn a little bit about yourself and your friends."

Another soft-science statistician's meaningless drool-fest, but this time linked to a commercial site. Why is it so hard for even 'professionals' in this field to come up with good science? Perhaps they are not taught cause and effect - Like if you have the traits "wealthy, highly educated and sophisticated", and "value power and achievement much more than others" and are "selfish, scoring low on measures of kindness and altruism" you actually have money to spend. Are you likely to have made an effort to makea lot of money if you are "interested in video games, computers, electronics, science and the internet"?.

I run a couple of Debian boxes, a MacBook Pro and an iPad. so I must be a wealthy/sophisticated/selfish/independent/young geek. What might get up some geeks' noses, is that when this retired old/fat/bald slob whips out his iPad, it (but alas, not me) is a girl-magnet.

The iPad is lovely. It, or its successors, are likely to be what most people will actually use.

So long then, Windows 2000

Tim99 Silver badge
Big Brother

Comedy OS?

My comedy OS X is a certified Unix. I run W2K in a Parallels VM for when I need to do some old SQL Server stuff. I also run Debian 5 CLI, Ubuntu and XP on it - The last time I ran XP was 9 weeks ago.

I too use Classic mode when I have to use XP, it is nowhere near as shouty. I often use the Graphite appearance setting in OS X - It makes using bash nice and restful...

Big Brother, because he is a nice washed out colour too.

Observer columnist in online porn mixup

Tim99 Silver badge
Grenade

Re: Over 55's

You do know that much all of the stuff that makes your shiny Google & Skype stuff work was done by people over 55...

Now go and play on Twitter (or Facebook or whatever you think is computing) with all of the other spoilt children - While we worry about Unix; and relational databases; and TCP/IP; and the World Wide Web; and C, C++ and Java - The trivial stuff that actual makes everything work.

Sorry, my mistake, Tim Berners-Lee and James Gosling are only just 55.

Sorry again - You may have touched a nerve - I probably spend too much time with people under the age of 35 who think that the internet is the big blue "e"; and wonder why they need a different account name and password to log onto their PC and Facebook; and think that Microsoft invented everything to do with computers.

Uphill, In the snow, both ways.

Windows 7 Backup gets users' backs up

Tim99 Silver badge
Linux

Quick reliable backup

I use SystemRescueCD: http://www.sysresccd.org/

It is a bootable CD-ROM or USB stick that can be used to back up to a removable drive or network storage. It is fast and reliable.

Some IT shps do not allow it, as it can be used to copy files or reset/create Administrator accounts/passwords outside the normal Windows security model.

Nobel Prize winner on dodgy World Cup ball

Tim99 Silver badge
Grenade

Buckyballs

"But I suppose now popstars do international relations, chemists now do physics on footballs they've never examined." Or journalists spin stories to support their own viewpoint...

One of Andrew's usual sarky pieces - Kroto is firmly in the "climate change is real and happening" camp, but then he would be wouldn't he? A real scientist, to be taken down a peg, rather than a loony like Christopher Monckton who's word is gospel.

Andrew, you have been told before, the organization is called "The Royal Society of Chemistry" - I thought that the first thing that a journalist was taught was "get the names right".

Kroto, Curl and Smalley made Buckminsterfullerene in 1985.

So all in all, up to Andrew's usual standard - If he can't be bothered, why would we take anything he writes seriously?

Easy-peasy science GCSEs binned

Tim99 Silver badge
Pint

Re:We were taught how the bloody thing worked

When I took it in the 1960s we had to draw the eyeball as well, and show that the image was inverted...

In the snow, uphill, both ways.

Murdoch hacks grumble over outsourced IT failures

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Duhhhhhhhh

As an Ancient Britain, I was taught "Oxford" spelling in the 1950s. My trusty Pocket Oxford Dictionary (1984) spells the words optimiZation and standardiZation. Both the Z and S spellings are acceptable - Z infers the writer is American or has a 'good' English education.

Perhaps he just went to a posh school? Or, possibly, his outsourced staff don't know how to change his default Windows installation to (British) English?

IE zero-day used in Chinese cyber assault on 34 firms

Tim99 Silver badge
Badgers

Browsers?

For goodness sake, just mandate that senior people (and all "Managers") must use Lynx.

It would at least cut down some of the rubbish out there...

Monty's 'Save MySQL' mudsling gets 15,000 backers

Tim99 Silver badge
Badgers

Monty - Cheeky

I had an e-mail invitating me to sign the petition. I believe the only way that Monty could have obtained my e-mail address was from when I signed up for a newsletter from mysql.com in August 2006.

We did not do anything with MySQL from this time onwards as we went with SQL Server and SQLite - If we wanted a 'free' server database we would have gone with PostgreSQL as the licencing was much more favourable.

So did Monty have a copy of the mailing list when MySQL was sold to Sun?

Disclaimer: A long time ago I was an Oracle developer. It seems to me that the GPL protects almost anyone who wants to fork MySQL - Even Monty's MariaDB. I did NOT sign the petition.

MPs slap ICO for bad language

Tim99 Silver badge
FAIL

@AC Clapton Omnibus

If you are going to be an arrogant prat, learn how to spell "speech"...

Tim99 Silver badge
Boffin

Simple

About 30 years ago, I worked as a scientist in the civil service. Part of my job was to explain science to 'real' people. My boss told me that if you could not explain something simply to "the man on the Clapton Omnibus"; you probably didn't really understand it yourself and, by implication, you were probably an arrogant prat.

Good advice that I try to follow.

IBM chases HP (and Sun) with tiny mem prices

Tim99 Silver badge
WTF?

@AC 21st November 2009 04:41 GMT

What the hell were you thinking? Running hundreds of virtual machines in a *NIX environment - You may remember that the whole point of *NIX is that it scales out without having to run each application in a VM, and that you can isolate each user from everyone else...

Perhaps you come from a Windows (shudder) background. You got the replacing 250 servers with 4 servers bit right, but really! 100's of VMs, with their associated overhead - Perhaps you should have saved a bit of your money for some independent (not IBM) advice. AIX may not be everyone's favourite *NIX, but it generally just works.

"We used to drink koolaide to stay up at night for our midnight planned outages, now with partition mobility we sleep." I note, with interest, that your post was timed at 04:41 GMT - It was not modded until 11 hours later?

Microsoft hugs Eclipse for Windows 7 and Azure love

Tim99 Silver badge
Alert

Oh No

It's a trap...

'More than ever before' now studying Sci/Tech in Blighty

Tim99 Silver badge
Boffin

Forensics - AC

Having achieved Chartered status in a 'real' science (one of the sciences that does not have 'science' in its name), and having worked as a forensic scientist, I have some bad news for people with forensic science degrees - You will not get a real job in a real forensic science laboratory.

Professional forensic scientists almost always have a good degree in a 'real' science subject - They are then taught the forensing stuff as junior forensic scientists.

It should be noted that after about 20 years, I switched to IT, which is a damned sight easier and much better paid than 'real' science...

Oracle and Sun fingered for Sidekick fiasco

Tim99 Silver badge
FAIL

Or, maybe our instinct that it was Microsofts fault?

Roughly Drafted Magazine has a fourth source that points the finger at Microsoft's Roz Ho...

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2009/10/15/microsofts-pinkdanger-backup-problem-blamed-on-roz-ho/

After personal involvement with rectifying other people's stuff-ups, I would go for management's "We don't need no stinking back-ups" instruction as the likely cause.

Debian to harness FreeBSD with kernel port

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Troll

Mono?

Oh Joy. Now we can all use C# and Mono - Just in case we wanted to avoid the Microsoft Trap.

Microsoft's web world shrinks

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Badgers

Why market share counts - Advertising

MS has good reason to worry. Firefox has Adblock.

MS seem to have realised that they are unlikely to continue their success in installing Windows and Office on everybody's computers and reaping the advantage of a monopoly. Their new model seems to be evolving to rely more on joint ventures with media corps in an effort to continue their world domination - No adverts, no income for media corps...

NetBSD, Mandriva get shiny new releases

Tim99 Silver badge
Stop

NetBSD and Linux

Tw_t !

Austin, are you looking for a flame war?

NetBSD and Linux as a double feature indeed!

Researchers dissect world's first Mac botnet

Tim99 Silver badge
Stop

Perspective?

Lets not all get too carried away here - A Trojan from January!

Slashdot/Symantec: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1201797&cid=27606489

Windows Home Server fixes bugs with Power Pack 2

Tim99 Silver badge
Linux

@Robert Taylor - Linux server

At home, I use a previous version of the Excito server http://www.excito.com/

The new one costs less than 300 quid for 500GB. It works as a mail server, Apache web server, MySQL server, torrent server, print server and file server. It also runs Firefly, so we have all of our iTunes music stuff on it. The best bits are that it uses about 10Watts, is much smaller than the HP, is almost silent, and (in my opinion) looks a lot nicer.

As it runs Debian, I grant you that you might need to know a bit of Linux to get the best out of it - We use rsync to back up everything from three client machines (Delta Copy should work for Windows clients).

If you want to do a monthly bare metal backup/restore of a Windows PC look at Partimage and SystemRescueCD - It is very fast, and reliable.

Super Micro squeezes four servers into one chassis

Tim99 Silver badge
Linux

Save the planet?

Alternatively - Windows users - Save space, energy and staff by putting *NIX on more of your servers. Typically you can serve 2-4+ times more users with *NIX than Windows...

EC will force users to pick a Windows browser, says Microsoft

Tim99 Silver badge
Gates Horns

Safari

To everyone who whines about Apple should be made to unbundle Safari from OS X - The reason that they don't have to is "because 95% of the world's personal computers run Microsoft's Windows PC operating system" (Neelie Kroes - European Commissioner for Competition Policy).

http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=SPEECH/07/539&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en

Apple should start taking enterprise servers seriously

Tim99 Silver badge

@CurtisB SMB

Disclaimer - I actually have had a fair bit of experience of supplying server based systems to Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs). I have installed Linux, Windows/Dell/IBM/HP and Apple based solutions

The cost of the kit is the least of an SMBs problems. Many SMBs are held hostage by their (outsourced) IT after the kit has been installed. A quick look on Apple's site shows that a realistic Xserve small rack mounted server with 2x 1TB SATA hard drives, a Quad Core Xeon, 64MB Radeon graphics, a single power supply and a superdrive with unlimited clients costs ~2,400 quid - AppleCare Premium Service and Support costs an additional 635 quid. A Mac Pro (Tower) with similar specs and 256MB Radeon costs less than 1,850 quid - Now add Mac OS X Server (Unlimited-Client) at 616 quid and an AppleCare Protection Plan for Mac Pro at less than 200 quid... The 19 inch rack solution comes in at a 3,035 as opposed to 2,666 for the tower. For a 50 user system they are both a bargain.

With Linux you could probably do something similar for less than half of that - On the other hand, if you used a Microsoft Small Business Server (SBS) based solution, the software and client access licences (CALs) ALONE would cost you 4000 quid for 50 users; so add say another 1300 quid for the hardware. Oh! you wanted a SQL server as well sir! So that would be another box and licence and CALs - or you could spend about the same and use the MS SBS Premium product.

Compared with the pratting-about your Linux consultant will probably charge you for, and Microsoft's CAL Tax, an Apple Server solution may be a bargain.

Demise of British tank industry foretold admitted

Tim99 Silver badge

The problem with tanks?

I may be misremembering, but I am reasonably sure that an old declassified MOD document that I saw in the 1970's said that a WWII tank fired an average of 1.7 rounds in action/anger before it was disabled or destroyed.

I think the same document had the stunning information that it cost 5,000 quid to kill a combatant, and that was in WWII money.

Online storage start-up pitches 'USB stick on the internet'

Tim99 Silver badge
Stop

Save a few quid

How about a remote server and something like:-

rsync -avhe ssh --delete /home/user/dir/ user@remote.host.com:dir/

Unless you insist on Windows everywhere...

Fifty years later, steam appears on British railway

Tim99 Silver badge

@Ferry Boat - Electric Traction

Almost all larger "Diesel" locomotives use electric traction motors. The power is generated from the engine driving an alternator. The power from the alternator then drives the traction motors. It is common for each axle/bogie to have its own traction motor driven off the one alternator.

It can be argued that the French already have nuclear powered trains as nuclear power stations already generate most of the electricity used to power SNCF trains...

French boffin: Mac Pros emit toxic fumes

Tim99 Silver badge
Boffin

@Only cheap 'punch and crunch' PCB's use phenolic resins

Epoxy resins and plastics are ubiquatous in the modern environment. This is probably a worry as they are made from (and give off) Bisphenol A [2,2-bis(4-hydroxyphenyl) propane]. This is known to be an endocrine disruptor. Studies have shown this material can give carcinogenic effects, neurotoxicity and developmental toxicity, as well as an ability to mimic oestrogen giving early puberty induction and damage to male reproductive systems.

Oh, and epoxy resin PCBs also give off benzene when heated. Us chemist types often refer to plastics that contain phenolic compounds as phenolic resins - Bisphenol A is made from the condensation of phenol and acetone. Yes, I AM expert in this stuff...

Tim99 Silver badge
Boffin

Oh Dear! Some French boffin needs funding

A long time ago, I was a real scientist. A small part of my job was to analyse volatile organic materials emitted from electronic systems.

Guess what? If your device contains a phenolic printed circuit board (almost everything uses these), resistors, wrapped capacitors etc. They ALL emit benzene.

If you really want to avoid benzene, get rid or your car (petrol contains up to a percent or so of benzene). Perhaps you could stay indoors to avoid traffic fumes - No, that won't work either - Fumes from your carpets, foam furniture and laminated board are likely to contain benzene (and a lot more more harmful materials). If you live in the modern world, benzene is a necessary evil.

Anyway a Frenchman complaining about benzene contamination? Just Google "Perrier water" and "Benzene". Many bottled waters contain traces of benzene...

Postman Pat goes postal

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

Next Series

In the next series he will just be called "Pat" - Because he will be unemployed.

Ballmer on banking crisis: No one is safe

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Thumb Up

@dervheid - VERB

How about the suspended one being called the twatdanglee, the one suspending would be a twatdangler.

A past tense of a verb can be treated as a noun, e.g. the sentence "Bring out your dead" could be compared to "Bring out your twatdangled"...

Mayor Boris serves Governator cold revenge

Tim99 Silver badge

@Warhelmet

"You make that sound like a bad thing." (Gene Hunt)...

Apple grabs double-digit US laptop marketshare

Tim99 Silver badge
Flame

Apple flamers

Apple haters, why are you unable to spell khaki? Unless you meant Kharki in Bangladesh?

Yes, I am one of the elitist fashionistas - That is if you use this description when you refer to a fat, retired scientist/computer geek.

I bought Apple and *NIX stuff after I retired so that I did not have to continue to deal with the hell-hole that is Windows. I type this on a PowerBook that runs OS X, Debian stable, and XP Professional (shudder!), although XP only gets used about once a fortnight.

Perhaps I am a little unkind about Windows - I made a good living, for years, keeping it running and writing applications. Shame that I no longer have a use for it...

Caterpillar plans 600 tonne godzilla-lorry robots

Tim99 Silver badge

@Maliciously Crafted Packet

Here in Oz, where we buy a lot of these for the iron ore mines in the North West, the preferred driver is a woman.

Women appear to treat the toys better, and as a result, it is reckoned that a typical years equipment maintenance costs up to $100,000 less than if a bloke was driving them...

JavaScript standards wrangle swings Microsoft's way

Tim99 Silver badge
Gates Horns

@MS is not always wrong

@And Clover - I find that assuming that MS *is* always wrong is a viable working hypothesis...

DARPA calls for 'DUDE' combo infra-nightscope

Tim99 Silver badge
Thumb Up

@ Stuart

Obligatory Douglas Adams quotation -

"Every time you try to operate one of these weird black controls that are labelled in black on a black background, a little black light lights up black to let you know you have done it."

Hotblack Desiato, Disaster Area, and the totally black ship in "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe"

http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=535094

King Arthur was English 'propaganda', French claim

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

@josiefatboy

Yes, but their propaganda may not have been that good. William (The Conqueror) was a Norman, and they were the same group as the Vikings, so perhaps they, as Aryan race, would have more in common with the Angles and Saxons?

Mines the one with the thumbed copy of Godwin's Law in the pocket...

Gumshoes fined for debt collection pretexting blag

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

@AC @ ICO = Lame ducks

[This guy came up to me and said, "Have you got a light Mac?"]

Reply - "No, this is the previous model PowerBook with a 17-inch screen."

or, "No. This is a ThinkPad X300 - I use Kubuntu, would you like to see it?"

or, "No. This is an Asus Eee - I find it works well on the beach."

Mine's the big check jacket with the music-hall stage makeup in the pocket.

Biggles battles Yanks for right to sport tash

Tim99 Silver badge

@ TrishaD

"I imagine that Flt Lt Ball calls his a 'kite' ...."

Only if he was "Shooting a line"

Tim99 Silver badge
Thumb Up

@ paul bell

Good comment paul.

As an aside - Flying types who swore allegiance to the King/Queen tend to call the kit an "aeroplane" or, if you don't have a classical education, an "aircraft". My father was an aircrew Flt. Lt. in WWII - He got upset about things like that...

A bit of fatherly advice was "Try to avoid leaving an aeroplane by parachute, unless the aeroplane is on fire". So far, I have not needed to follow this as a regular passenger on 747s.

Gates threatens to buy millions and millions of servers for Microsoft

Tim99 Silver badge
Gates Horns

@Solomon Grundy Re:And the Winner Is

"It's just a mainframe." Yes, I have been around long enough - I think that it's just as likely to be the 'centralization' v. the 'line of business/local user' computing thing.

Windows in corporate IT is now locked down so tightly (in a vain effort to keep it secure), that it might just as well be a mainframe - Or a large UNIX based system running X terminal sessions. All though a mainframe/UNIX system is unlikely to cark itself if a user does a clicky on a web-link.

I remember a DEC VAX/VMS product called 'All in One' from the 1980s. It allowed users to interact and collaborate with e-mail, word-processing, calendars and spreadsheets - The main difference was that it all happened with nice green/amber terminals. If you had a graphics terminal you could do charts and drawings as well. I could do pretty much everything that I needed with this suite. It took many more years to get functionality like that in the Microsoft world. The system's support requirements were typically 4 staff for each few hundred users, so obviously we couldn't have that...

Because I was 'scientific/technical/IT', I was allowed to get to all of this corporate goodness from a 'DEC Professional' computer (a cut down PDP-11). The operating system was called 'Professional Operating System' or P/OS - This name summed it up nicely - I suspect that it was one reason why DEC died.

Most 'malfunctioning' gadgets work just fine, report claims

Tim99 Silver badge

@ re: poor product design

Robin, take it back to the nice Apple people - They will give you a new one. Generally they accept broken stuff, even when you have done it yourself, providing you are reasonable about it...

Ofcom mulls BT Openreach price hike

Tim99 Silver badge

@Steven Hewitt

I preferred it when it was the office of the Postmaster General (PMG). Then, you had no doubt whatsoever that it was part of the governance and social fabric of the UK. The PMG's employees were considered a part of the Civil Service.

When I worked in the Civil Service in the 1970s, staff were instructed to report to the nearest Post Office if they were unable to get to work (Say, as a result of transport strikes or inclement weather.). I did once, they gave me a cup of tea, asked me to count some stationary, and then sent me home.

UK begins probe into aeroplane air quality

Tim99 Silver badge
Boffin

Somebody, somewhere needs research funding?

There is a lot of data on this. Google "tricresyl phosphate".

If you need more info on toxicity look for the "Material Safety Data Sheet" for tricresyl phosphate. You will see things like "EXPOSURE LIMITS:TWA: 0.1 (mg/m3)" -Time Weighted Average - (This is the sort of level you get for materials that are known to be toxic).

US protests to WTO over EU 'IT' tariffs

Tim99 Silver badge
Unhappy

@Mike Crawshaw @frymaster

Many years ago, my Dad gave me advice about politicians:-

They are mostly in it for themselves. You, as a voter have the choice of voting for politicians who were selected by very small groups of people to look after their interests. It is easy to recognise these people. They either smoke cigars and drink spirits in a small smoky room at the back of the Rotary Club (Conservative); or they smoke fags and drink beer in a small smoky room at the back of the Working Man's Club (Labour). These politicians are venal and corrupt.

Or you could vote for someone who has a burning desire to help people. These politicians are obsessive and very dangerous - They believe that "The End justifies the Means".

My Dad was an un-elected official who made Sir Humphrey Appleby look like a bumbling amateur. He was firmly of the opinion that most people really don't want much change, they just want their little lives to be a little better. Now that I am older, I suspect he was right...

Ref: Lord Acton - “Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority."

US Reapers get satnav bombs, deploy on Canadian border

Tim99 Silver badge
Black Helicopters

Be Afraid?

I believe that Canada is the largest exporter of oil to the USA. WMDs and Regime Change next?

Life a mess? The Moderatrix can help

Tim99 Silver badge
Boffin

@One of lifes big questions

Chris,

Liquids cool more quickly the hotter they are compared with their surroundings. So, for maximum cooling wait a few minutes then add the milk.

However, you are probably one of the iconoclasts who make tea with a tea-bag in a cup - Do yourself a favour and invest in a teapot. Making your tea in a cup will make it taste terrible. You really should put the milk in the cup first, then add the brewed tea. This prevents degradation of milk proteins which is liable to occur if milk encounters temperatures above 75°C.

Ref: http://www.rsc.org/pdf/pressoffice/2003/tea.pdf

Chinese boffins show off unbelievably tight ring

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

@chair?

Louis,

Benzene rings are planar (flat) because their electrons can be thought of as having a hybridization pi cloud. Six member saturated carbon rings like cyclohexanes, or nitrogen/carbon heterocyclic rings like RDX (Semtex), have chair and/or boat structures. The boat has both ends pointing up, the chair has one end pointing up with the other end down. The same molecule can alternate between the two structures. This is known as chair-boat hybridization.

Mine's the lab coat with the acid burns down the front.

BOFH: The Boss gets Grandpa Simpson syndrome

Tim99 Silver badge
Thumb Up

@Wow

Antony, I drove a DG Nova3 using RDOS. The machine was later replaced with a Nova 4C with a 25MB Winchester Drive. DG sent people out just to see it because they had never installed one with such a large fixed disc. The down side was we backed up and archived everything on 8" floppies - It was used to acquire and process data from mass spectrometers.

I remember that in the month I ordered it, I bought a 3 bedroom detached house in the UK - The Nova was about twice the price of my house, so say half a million quid in present money.

The disc unit was huge (19" rackable). You could see everything because the top case of the drive was transparent. Yes, obviously, the heads crashed on the HD after a year or two. The damaged aerofoil head had buried itself deep into the gouges in the platter. Of course these young-uns don't know that the heads in disc drives actually flew on the thin layer of air that was carried along with the rotating disc surface. I need to lie down now for my afternoon nap...

Microsoft to punt pensioner-proof PC

Tim99 Silver badge
Gates Horns

Re: Does this mean

Nice one Stu. We pensioners might get a little tired in the afternoon because some of our brains have degraded from having to invent a lot of this computing stuff.

I can only sleep on a few afternoons, as I spend the rest of them teaching other retired people computing. No, I do not recommend anything from Microsoft.

Fortunately, I don't need to remember to turn on our home computers so that they are ready for use. Two of them are energy efficient Debian servers (<10 watts), and are on all of the time. The other two can be easily awoken from OS X's 'Sleep' mode.

As an aside, most of us oldies know the difference between "their" and "there".

Build a 14.5 watt data center in a shoebox

Tim99 Silver badge
Linux

Have a look at the Excito Bubba

I have a couple of these http://www.excito.com/products.html

One of them does this:-

Linux 2.6, Debian; Apache web server; Dovecot IMAP server (IMAP, IMAPS); Postfix SMTP server; Fetchmail (for fetching email from other pop or imap accounts); File server (http, samba, ftp); Download manager (bittorrent, http, ftp); Printer server; DAAP streaming media server (Firefly); UPnP streaming media server (Mediatomb)

The other one is used as a backup and for 'development' (Well, OK, playing with it.). You can also install most ARM Debian packages that you might want like MC, SQLite, MySQL (if you really have to) etc.

They each use < 10 watts. Both of them have current up-times of about 100 days.

A new one with more stuff is due out later in the year.