Posts by roman iwasjuk

Keep up the pressure on the telcos, Canada

Re: Semi-Obsolete concept: FTTH as an "Urban privilege"

I'm not denying that it's more practical - BUT the problem (at least here in Ontario) is that there is only one provider of FTTH - Bell - and the FTTH is often bundled with their Fibe TV and data caps (and an introductory price reduction for 3 months or so that jumps by 30-40 per month afterwards)...

Until they are FORCED to allow reselling of FTTH to other providers and unbundling of it from their TV offering, FTTH will not be a viable option and costs will not drop to realistic values....

When is a refurbished server not refurbished? Ask this Dell reseller

Re: One teeny issue

There used to be a company called pcoutlet that did the same with HP gear - they were purchased by Ingram (I believe) and left the market...

fortunately some of the former employees didn't join in and went into business for themselves:

http://www.jtcomputers.net/

As for Fibrestore - I agree - have bought some 10gig modules from them at 1/10 the cost of OEM - and they work very well!

Seagate's spinning rust most likely to crash, claims backup biz

seagate drives

I was at a tech conference not that long ago where seagate had a booth - all of us were complaining about drive reliability - and they pulled the same line - how the drives were desktop drives not enterprise drives...maybe I'm showing my age but even desktop drives USED to carry some sense of reliability...

I still have numerous old ata and scsi drives from seagate that are still working reliably (old system needed for archive purposes but we can't be bothered to try to upgrade it to new hardware - only referenced occasionally for historical data) - and these drives are now over 15 years old...

On the other hand we've got a whole box of dead seagate drives that all failed just after the warranty period...many of them while under warranty and we just couldn't be bothered to get them replaced...

we've even seen some drives that appear good - yet they corrupt the stripe set of the raid array they're in...

I sometimes wonder whether maxtor bought seagate or if it was the other way around - as drive quality has slipped big time ever since that purchase....

We've now shifted over to WD drives where we need any sense of reliability....and avoid seagate wherever possible...

Home Depot: 56 million bank cards pwned by malware in our tills

The problem with x.25 is that the telcos don't want to support or provide it anymore - just like they're doing away with dvacs for the alarm side - all these systems are being forced to move to ip based communications - along with alarm systems! I'm really starting to get a bad feeling about this direction, as we're moving all our communications into 1 basket - and when it crashes EVERYTHING will go down....