Agreed, Pierre.
But it's not clear the main unions have such an encompassing view or even a coherent strategy. They act out the tradition and it gives them some power for a little while. It must be quite the ego-trip for some of the leaders but where are they going with this?

I've not put forth any numbers about 2007. I suggested you use those numbers because they are lower than the 2002 numbers I used to contrast France and the UK. Besancenot's organization was named "Revolutionary Communist League" (now rebranded as "New Anticapitalist Party"). So he's obviously a comm...

Sorry, but if you want to "correct" my numbers by bringing up something unrelated and arguably irrelevant (these elections are not high-profile like the 2007 election), please try not to deceive people. Here are the actual results reflecting how people voted: evidently communists 9.2%, evidently fas...

To answer andyb's questions, France has a tradition of political strikes. The reason why young people are involved is, again, political. Compare the electoral results of the French communist (13% in 2002) and fascist parties (19% in 20002) to their equivalent in the UK and you will see that the poli...

"Jerky" is awfully vague and subjective. And you don't say what sorts of pages are affected. Browsers usually have settings for this stuff if you care. I only care about loading times and scrolling speed. I wouldn't spend that kind of money on a CPU which is well on its way to obsolescence without f...

What problem are you trying to solve? If you're only trying to solve the "getting slow" part, the proper way to go about it would be to determine what exactly is causing this slowdown. But perhaps the first quick and dirty fix to try would be to buy a cheap SSD and to reinstall your OS and stuff on ...

I don't know if the seller is trustworthy and if the price is good in your country (it would be very good in mine) but this combo can idle quite low with the right PSU... probably lower than anything that's not based on an Atom or laptop gear. These are among the best chips out there, it looks like....

Well, there's nothing in the BIOS to control the fan as far as in can see. Maybe Speedfan can do it in Windows but the RHEL5 support is a bit of a joke. I didn't really investigate the issue in any depth but I've had to use a third-party repository to check the CPU's temperature. I'm not reading all...

Yeah, that doesn't look like a case suitable for the D510MO. See Morex's T3410 for what one should look like.

80W is pretty good for 12TB but its still a lot of juice. You could save hundereds of kWh a year by shutting it down when you're pretty sure nobody's going to want to use it (depening on sleep/work/whatever schedules). A smaller server could be scheduled to wake it up ahead of the time people get ho...

It would be a bit of a waste to use a physical machine for most types of tests now that it's become so easy to use virtual ones. If you're not going to connect it to a display, best use it for stuff that needs to run 24/7 (a more powerful computer would waste too much electricity) or for stuff that ...

You could use the same external dock with any number of drives. That's not the issue. If you have an archive of sorts, single drives might be the way to go. The main reason being that you don't risk losing all your backups everytime you back up something. You should really be back up to several sepa...

Taxcheat writes "isn't an easier solution to not having ECC memory going with something like the ZFS file system that has built-in scrubbing/checksum of the data?" ZFS is a filesystem designed for systems which have ECC and are more reliable than your average PC in other ways as well. Last I heard, ...

Intel's ARK used to say that Clarkdales support ECC. Now it doesn't say anything. On the other hand, it has no problem stating that non-Xeon Lynnfields don't support ECC. Lynnfields have different memory controller than Clarksdales. Meanwhile, (some) motherboards makers say that Clarkdales (or at le...

ECC has essentially no downsides but, as I said, there's no point in going out of your way to have it on a rip library. You generally want it on servers, especially largish ones because servers are usually used to store data you don't want to lose. Traditionally, people have been putting all the dat...

Modern RAM won't be good enough for me until someone figures out a way to take duds off the market. It's certainly not good enough for the consumers who are returning it. And I've wasted enough time arguing about what makes a DIMM defective to know that return rates don't tell the whole story. ECC i...

What you don't say, Mike, is that the average DIMM in that study had nearly 4000 correctable errors a year! It seems that most memory subsystems are solid but the flaky ones can be quite the wreckers. And ECC can apparently handle most of them (the per-DIMM incidence of correctable and uncorrectable...

Asus is one board maker which makes cheap boards which officially support ECC. On the AMD side there's a wealth of options and they make at least one affordable Intel server board which is supposed to take affordable Clarkdales and ECC. But the power consumption and reliability of Asus boards might ...

The repercussions of having memory errors which are not properly handled by the hardware or the OS can be dire... as dire as you care to imagine such as having an app write all over your data, corrupting many files (and you won't know which ones). Crashes and a little corruption here and there are m...

For the people claiming Intel does not support ECC on non-Xeon CPUs: please do your research and make sure you're not confusing "fully buffered" with ECC in general.

@Mike: I'm not crazy about some of the stuff lopgok pushes (such as RAID5 or burning >160W on idle) but the cheap and efficient Biostar mobo that was discussed heaps on SPCR is supposed to support chipkill for instance. This ain't some kind of exclusive technology. But it's a uATX board. So far as I...

first impression (unmodded with factory BIOS settings): I like the overall design and the price but the unit I got is not quiet. It gets a bit louder from time to time even under a light load (as well as when swiching the server on). It's not as loud as most servers obviously but you wouldn't want t...

The 21 dBA noise claim is pretty good. Seems quieter than the <30 dBA spec for their home server and storage works machines. I haven't found any specifics about what to compare their 22dB figure to but I suspect we need to compare it to the rest of the Proliant line. They claim 25dB (operating, not...

the flashy Asus D510 board is ... more expensive. Maybe I should buy one and see how passive cooling works with that heatsink. Well, its price has dropped around here. Here's how the AT5NM10-I compares to the D510MO then: -bigger, mean-looking heatsink which covers the NM10 chip as well as the CPU ...

LFF means 3.5 inches. The full-sized 5.25 slot is probably meant for tape drives. This ain't marketed for home media streaming but for small businesses and the like. This is why it officially supports RHEL but not WHS. These babies look interesting. Does anyone know if the optional remote management...

Thanks.
I didn't expect to hear an obvious difference between the 5K500.B and the 7200.4. The Hitachi was able to elicit a "but I don't hear anything!" from a naive subject while the faster Seagate couldn't pull that off. So I was wondering if I had scored a particularily quiet unit somehow.

It would be useful if you could determine what PSU you have. Maybe you won't find independent measurements of its efficiency but you might be able estimate how much power it wastes based on its specifications. If it has a 70% efficiency when your computer is idle, I figure an 85% efficient PSU would...

I don't really need a "powerful desktop" - it's used only as an HTPC mainly to play movies/music, download content and light surfing - not much gaming etc... With these requirements, I'd pick an Atom but the thing is that they're less powerful than your "weak CPU" and not by a small margin. So I do...

I'm in the market for 2.5'' drives and SPCR is, so far as I know, the only reliable source for the noise they make. So I bought the single-platter version of the two models measured in this review (manufacturers take note!). They might not be the most quiet drives on the market but at least I was co...

You will not get much lower power consumption than you have now if you want a powerful machine. I don't know if there are Atom systems which can play all 1080p content comfortably because I have no interest in playing that kind of content. A display that can take advantage of such a resolution might...