It seems not every company in Silicon Valley is struggling in today’s sluggish economy. Evernote, the mutli-platform note-taking company with the slogan “Remember everything”, is throwing a party this July in the San Francisco bay area. The party, to take place on 07/08/09 (hence the silly mnemonic), is open to all comers, and they even be giving away free drinks. If you’re going to be in the bay area anyway, this might be worth a look.

Read More

Read More (More shots from space)

Read More (Play Game) Source: Kotaku

DSLE has had their boneheaded technical issues in the past, certainly. But I hate big telco, so I’ve tried to be a faithful customer. Incidentally, I just started as a sysadmin in the silicon valley area of Northern California, USA. There’s obviously a lot of tech here, which means a lot of ISP’s. Even so, I tried to keep DSLE in the spirit of supporting the little guy, and because your don’t have to be a lawyer to understand their fair access policy. As history will show, that turned out to be a mistake…

The numbers speak for themselves.

Things actually started off well this time, DSLE even kept their original turn on date for once — maybe the first time ever in my history with them. Only a few days later, AT&T broke something on their end, which took down my lines. When it came back up, no sync. After waiting on hold twice at an hour apiece (something I’ve come to expect from them), I was told that yep, as I suspected AT&T had messed something up. So they’d have to cancel and reorder my DSL through AT&T – 2 weeks wait time. Well, I telecommute about 50% of the time (including 3:00am maintenance windows), so unfortunately it wasn’t even an option for me to wait. I spoke with DSL Extreme’s billing department, politely explained my situation and asked to be let out of my contract. Keep in mind, I’m an 8-year faithful customer with at least a dozen referrals. The woman on the other end of the line basically told me to get f***ed.

I understand that working for an ISP is high-stress… hell, the whole industry is high stress. But I’ve never spoken to a customer service rep who was that rude in my entire life. So much for working with the customer. Even if I wasn’t already canceling DSLE out of necessity, I would have after that conversation. Not only that, I will warn all of my friends and colleagues with existing accounts and inform them to jump ship. DSL Extreme is not the little guy anymore; they’ve grown too big for their britches, and their customer support is awful. You’d be better off just going with the big guys for all the bullsh*t they put you through. If you’re getting ass for service anyway, might as well be tier-1 ass.

As for me, I went with Comcast, who gave me a turn on date of today, and even threw in a discount because they thought my DSL Extreme story about the rude b*tch in billing was hilarious. Is Comcast a big evil company? Certainly. Are they better to work with than DSL Extreme? In my experience, definitely. According to others on RateItAll.com, I’m not alone in this experience.

The first one did last for around 11 months, it was left folding when idle but once GTA4 was played, it died. Second one started to crash a lot when GTA4 was played on it, eventually died again. So don’t know who to blame the recent heat wave in the UK or GTA4?

Anyway both times Sony have been kind enough to replace it for free (considering its under warranty) but they did manage to lose my copy of Pro Evolution Soccer 2008 (frequently played game), ahhhh! but they’ve been kind enough to send me a bran new copy.

Edited on (10 August 2008)

PS3 arrived on Monday 4th August and PES 2008 arrived very next morning, hurray! Excellent service! If you have any questions, similar/bad experience please leave a comment.

If it were Intel alone, that would be one thing, but nVidia’s nForce 500 series chipsets have cut the available IDE channels to one. ATi’s SB600 has also dropped to one PATA port. While I haven’t run across anything indicating similar actions from VIA or SiS, they will undoubtably do so within a few years. By that time, I think SATA will be much more common, particularly on optical drives.

Going back to the useable PATA drives many people still have: that’s an issue. If it’s serving the purpose, has enough space, and still works, you tend to keep it. Even as a simple backup, a 40GB hard drive has yet to be too small to be useful. Hard drive companies are still producing and planning for PATA drives. Seagate’s 7200.10 hard drive line, which utilizes perpendicular recording, still includes plans for IDE hard drives along with SATA ones. I don’t know the ratios of PATA drives to SATA ones, but it doesn’t seem like the hard drive manufacturers are starting to ditch PATA yet.

Problems, Ahoy

Another thing to consider is optical drive support. Aside from a few SATA variations largely produced by Plextor, CD- and DVD-drives are still coming with PATA. Sure, a few SATA drives are available, but I have a hard time believing that you’ll convince people to jump to a drive double in price that most people probably won’t notice and/or care. This is nothing against Plextor. The company makes a good product and factoring in the quality, yes, it’s only right that they charge a higher price. It’s the same thing if you were to buy a Sony boom box instead of piecing together an CD player, reciever and speakers made by, say Onkyo, for listening in your room. Sure, the system pieced together is going to walk all over the boom box, but not everyone has, or want to spend, the money for the component system. Many people have good drives, and most of them aren’t going to drop it if it’s doing the job and still works…at least for an interface change.

Besides the simple interface issue, what about OS installation? In a system with ICH8, for example, you can expect at least some of the motherboard companies to offer an additional one or two IDE channels through an external controller chip. The problem comes in when you have a controller chip that’s not designed for optical devices or that the OS installation CD, which is more that likely Windows, does not recognize the controller. It cannot communicate with the rest of the system, and can’t install the OS.

I’m sure some of you might be thinking, “Well, IDE and SATA drives, should work on said interfaces without a hitch, so what’s the issue?” If only it were that simple. As you’re probably aware, motherboards are frequently coming equipped with RAID functionality. When these controllers are in RAID mode, only hard drives are able to function with this capacity.