1 By the way: Pete, one time I asked you to recommend a firewall, and you did. Problem was, they had stopped making it. So it's not that I ignored your advice, but that I couldn't follow it. Thanks for the help, anyway.

2 No problem. I saw the post and was going to bloviate about USB networkt adapters and spatial bit density of WiFi but really there's not much point. You probably did the right thing here.

3

And this morning Newegg sent me a shipping notice. I didn't even pay the "fast processing" bribe.

I chose 3-day ground, from  SoCal. If the clock starts tomorrow, then it would be Thursday, except Thursday is a holiday. So for the moment I'm expecting it by Friday.

4 Ugh. I wish I could reconfigure the wireless I'm on now, but the box comes pre-configured from AT&T. I get to log in to the memorable name of 2WIRE*** along with about 8 other wi-fi hubs in range. At least they come with the security activated. (And the password is already helpfully printed on a sticker right on the unit for that extra layer of security.)

5

I infer that this is your internet access you get from AT&T? A wifi hub instead of something with an ethernet connection? Yeesh... That's bizarre.

6 Yes. The house I'm in is currently on DSL (there's more to it than that, but I need to write a post), and the modem is also the hub. I've not checked to see if I can plug into it. It's in the exact wrong room to be of any use for a hard connection.

7 Love the names.

8 Well, rest assured I'm not going to name anything after Kuroko. She's just a bit too strange for me.

9 I only went to ANN to find some names and saw Minako Kotobuki as Mitsuko Kongou, Kana Ueda as Mii Konori, Satomi Arai as Kuroko Shirai. What are you doing to me, Steven? The temptation is overwhelming.

10

What? You haven't seen it? I recommend the Mazui version. These days that's the one I usually watch. (We compared Chihiro, Ayako, and Mazui here.)

Since then there's been a fourth, AtsA. But AtsA's translator is an idiot. (Translating "177" as "117", for instance, and I noticed a lot of other major mistakes just in the first episode.)

And yeah, it has an awesome cast. Konori-sempai and Kongou are not primary characters, but Kuroko is one of the central four. Konori got her own plot arc, in eps 15 and 16. And though Kongou is a "chew toy" for most of the series, she gets a couple of pretty major moments of awesome in the final arc.

When I recommended it to the guy who was looking to get back into anime, I was serious. I wasn't just recommending "things I like" (I didn't recommend Asobi ni Iku Yo, did I?). Despite the fact that it's more of an action-adventure series than day-in-the-life, it really does have a lot in common with Azumanga Daioh on a deep level: the main characters are well conceived and presented very well, and the interaction among them is a major attraction of the series.

This isn't a gimmick show. It's a character-driven show.

11 Can you watch Railgun without having seen Index first?

12

Absolutely so. In fact, it's probably better that way. While I was watching it (having seen Index first) I kept expecting things that didn't happen.

If you watch it without having seen Index, you won't have any preconceptions to get in the way.

There are a few references to Index, and some Index characters make cameo appearances, but they won't really confuse you. Just a "huh? Who was that?" maybe four or five times over the whole series.

1 Order Status- Admin

Whatever that means, it certainly doesn't *sound* good.  You'd think a status would be "in process" or "shipped" or something like that.

1 The claim is that they didn't expect a lot of people to buy it, so they only made a batch of 5,000, and then got 9,000 preorders.

-j

2  They took out the comma and passed the savings on to you. 

3

They took out the comma and passed the savings on to you.

In which case, I expect that we will see an extra comma in our host's next update.

4 Why, this is outrageous!  I remember when HP used punctuation that worked!!

5

J, that thing you linked to says,

When demand outstripped supply, HP apparently had to re-hire production workers just to get the presses printing out tablets again, and are presently placating angry customers by offering them over $100 off their $800 purchase as apology.

When I was still able to look at the order status page, it said my order was something like #980. And I haven't received any such placation. So given that my order got in very early, maybe, just maybe, I'll get one of the early ones. Would be nice.

If they actually have to go back for another production run sooner than they expected, it could be a really big delay. They'd have to order parts and get the factory set up for another production run. And the contracter in China might have something else going on now, so they might have to wait a bit for the factory to free up. The article suggested a 6 week delay, but I could see it being even longer than that.

6 I did receive that form letter saying there'd be a delay. And maybe the reason I haven't been placated is because I didn't get mad. I guess only time will tell.

7

Anyway, shouldn't that error message have a bit more punctuation? A comma or a semicolon?

Which would you prefer?  Punctuality, or punctuation? 

8

I want my toy, but I'm losing hope that I'll get it any time soon. One of the comments in the thread J linked to speculated that most of the initial build was preallocated to a few bulk buyers.

(Then it spiraled in when the Apple fanbois showed up to declare that the iPad was obviously superior.)

9

That page is back now and responding very quickly. Nothing on that page has changed.

My order  was #998, but if some of the earlier ones were bulk buys, I may be SOL. If those guys at the magazine knew when theirs was to be delivered, why haven't I been told yet? (Unfortunately, that half-assed letter may have been it for me, meaning I really am SOL.)

10

Well.... today I received another email from them informing me of a delay. It included a different URL I could use to check on my order status.

Following that one, it said my order was scheduled to ship on Nov 13 (last Saturday) and to be delivered on Nov 15 (today). So we'll see about that.

On the face of it, that's bogus. UPS blue label doesn't count weekends in their "two day" time duration, and I don't think they accept shipments on Saturdays. But I'll be keeping an eye on that page to see what it might say later.

11 Another rumor: HP is delaying shipment in order to fix a last-minute fatal bug where the unit freezes and has to be reset.

12 As my mom says, "The squeaky wheel gets the grease"

Not trying to offer you unsolicited advice, but perhaps some complaining would result in some $$$ coming your way.

13 The newer status page has been updated. It no longer says "delivery today". Now it says "date will follow".

1 Of course it's a form letter. In fact, "Dear DEN BESTE STEVEN" is an oxymoron. If you, or their customers in general, were the slightest bit dear to HP, they would at least make sure that their mail merge wasn't fouling up people's names in email salutations. It's amazing how many people think that customer service and polish don't matter in the Internet age.

2

It isn't even a form letter they composed specifically about the Slate. It looks to be a standard form letter they've been using for years.

Ah, I tell you, Hewlett and Packard must be rolling over in their graves. The company they founded isn't even named after them anymore.

I worked for Tektronix between 1976 and 1982, and back then HP and Tek were major competitors in a whole lot of high tech areas. It was something of a truism that if in any market both HP and Tek competed, there wasn't a lot of room left for anyone else, and none of the customers cared.

I remember that in one of Tek's annual reports, they made a comment that Tek was blessed with having a superb competitor -- and I know I felt that way, during my years in the Logic Analyzers group. HP brought out the best in us, and I don't doubt we did the same to them. (Especially since we went from #3 in sales in that market to #1 during my years there, mwaahaahaaa.)

But that was the HP that Hewlett and Packard founded, the legendary Test and Measurement business. Carly Fiorina spun that off when she decided to make HP into a computer company.

Why, oh why, didn't she use the "Compaq" brand name for her computer company, and leave "Hewlett Packard" for the T&M business? (sob)

3 I had a Compaq desktop in college, and the name "Compaq" will forever say, to me, "adequate for end users but not great." My current company-supplied laptop is a HP and I hate it, primarily for its incredibly buggy "QuickLaunch" touch buttons. Honestly, the only PC maker with whom I've had a genuinely good (as opposed to merely bearable) experience is *cough* Apple. Eheh.

4 IBM used to have quite a reputation for quality among their laptops, but I don't know if Lenovo is still known for that.

5 There was a good reason why customers didn't care--nobody else came close to matching the quality of those products.  At approximately the same time you worked for Tek, I worked for Boeing Electronics (back when that company still made stuff, sob!).  We used HP for power supplies and frequency generators, and Tek for scopes and logic analyzers.  An HP1000 formed the backbone for our automated test station.  Neither the 757 nor the 767 could ever have flown without the support of that equipment. 

6 I love HP and Tek gear of that era.  My dad worked for a big engineering firm at the time, and while they didn't exactly let me play with stuff, I did get to spend a day with an HP 9845 workstation.  Ah, those were the days...

7 My personal timeline for the downfall of HP begins in 1994, when they released the first HP printer that sucked (the original Color LaserJet). By the time they introduced the PhotoSmart printer in 1997 that made water-soluble 4x6 prints, it was all over.

(seriously, you could lick the ink off of someone's photos weeks after they were printed)

-j

8 I hate the nipple, so I hate my T400. But it was "free" (company buy). I'm so going back to Dell when I'm done with this.

9 Even today HP make good stuff.  I still have my LaserJet 4MP from 1995 or 96, and my new Color LaserJet 1600 is built like a tank.  The problem is they're not consistent anymore.

10 Yeah, that resonates. It used to be safe to recommend pretty much anything with an HP label on it; if it wasn't good, they wouldn't have released it in the first place. The first Color LaserJet was just...sad; within a few months we had a dozen color Tektronix Phasers, both solid ink and laser, and everyone loved them. The poor group who bought the HP had to suffer with it until it broke down out of warranty, and then they could finally get a Phaser.

-j

11

The stuff that we produced back then (both HP and Tek) was extremely high quality, but it also cost a fortune. For a while I worked in Tek's computer terminal group. This was in the days of the Tek 4014 terminal, the only terminal in the world at that time which could do 4000*3000 graphics, using a DVST (Direct View Storage Tube), a patented Tektronix technology. If you needed to do graphics like that, there was only one place you could go. And it was going to cost you about $14,000 each -- and that's 1975 dollars. In modern dollars it's more like about $25,000.

Tek sold them as fast as they could be made, but man, the price! And that was pretty much true for everything we made.

Not so much for HP, which did have consumer product groups even back then, but their stuff was top-drawer even in that market. You could buy a TI pocket calculator for $25 or an HP pocket calculator for $150, but the HP was notably superior, physically and in terms of function.

Modern HP, not so much. They're competing in commodity markets, and you can't charge a premium in those markets. Which means you can't afford to create the kind of quality HP used to be known for. It costs, and people won't pay.

12

Tek had an internal research group called "Tek labs" which wasn't directly involved in product development. They were doing more speculative research. Once a year they held a science fair, which engineers like me were invited to. The goal was to let us know what they were working on, partially in hopes that we'd go back to our development groups and look for ways to productize it.

I never saw anything I could use, but when I was reading J's post, it reminded me that I saw a research prototype of a color printer at the Tek Labs science fair. The prototype was huge, with clear rubber tubes through which different color inks ran, and it looked like a monstrosity, but the printing was decent.

Turning that one into a product was tough, but they did it.

Tek Labs was in building 51, along with the corporate HQ. I think that's because Howard Vollum liked to wander around engineering areas, back when he was still alive.

13 Before about 1995-ish, Compaq made excellent computers.

After that, not so much.

I won't wipe my nose on a Compaq now.

14 Is no one other than me wondering why J is licking weeks-old photographs?

15 Ah, you've never seen the sort of pictures I used to shoot in Los Angeles!

-j

16 OK, OK, enough's enough...

1 Don't know if you will connect it to the iPaq, but just in case, I hope Saten doesn't screw around with Uiharu.

2 It would be interesting to see how one compact computing device would "lift the skirt" of another....

This is similar to what I went through waiting for my Aluratek Libre to arrive, after I pre-ordered it; except that about a week after I placed my order they pushed back the ship date three weeks.  *sigh*

1 Variance?

1 about:config

2 Thank you! And this:

browser.download.manager.showAlertOnComplete false

makes that weird slide-in stop happening. But I can't figure out which control it was that made the entries in the download frame autodelete once they're finished.

3 Set browser.download.manager.retention to 0. You may also be able to set it by clearing the "Remember download history" checkbox in the Privacy tab.

4

OK, that did it. Thank you, too!

Now how do I create multiple tool associations for a single file type?

5

For file associations, you want Control Panel\Programs\Default Programs\Set Associations (typing Default Programs in Start will get you there).

 

Then, select a file type and double-click it. Add a program (you may have to browse to it). That's added to both the Open With... and becomes the default opener, so you may have to change it again if you like the current default.

6 Excellent! That worked beautifully.

1 Pen and finger input, SDXC and USB for getting data in and out, no bigger or heavier than an iPad (smaller and ever-so-slightly thicker, actually), and I honestly like Windows 7. The only downsides I see are the battery life and the fact that it's HP, a brand I haven't trusted with portable computers for a while.

-j

2

I'm not convinced it doesn't have a network interface. It comes with a dock, and I bet that the dock has an ethernet interface.

Or maybe the optional advanced one does. The PDF file says it comes with a dock, but that there's also an "optional USB 2 Docking Station". But there's nothing like that I can find on the HP site. Maybe it's planned for later release. It's hard for me to believe they'd make it so that Wifi was the only way to network it.

The PDF file says that the display is "1024*600, 1024*768 for some apps" which suggests to me that they're usually snarfing part of the display for controls. That's OK.

The processor is a 1.86GHz Atom. I don't really know a lot about that, except that it's the processor that Intel developed which optimizes for low power consumption instead of immense  computing power. The obvious question is whether the hardware can play a 720*480 MKV, but I bet it can.

3

OK, I went through the video again, and I think that the 600/768 business refers to the Windows taskbar and menu bar, which wouldn't consume screen space if the app goes full screen. They prominently feature video conferencing as an ability, so that suggests that the CPU has some mmph.

And including the electronics for ethernet is easy. Including a connector is not, and that's why I bet there is one, but only on the dock.

USB-networking is maybe possible. The USB port on the Slate itself is a master, but maybe there's a slave port in the dock, which could be used to connect to another Windows machine for networking (which is what the iPaq does).

But I'm probably wrong. If those features were present, they'd probably say so.

Thing to do is wait for some magazine to get its hands on one and read the review.

4 I've been desperately waiting for a good android tablet. The iPad has too many restrictions for me, I'm not sure about winmo7 given Microsoft's history on niche markets like that, and I love my android phone. All these tablets claim to be able to play HD video, but I'd want to see it before I purchased. The ability to watch anime away from my desk would be awesome.

5

I just took a look at the iPad tech specs. It has a USB slave port rather than a USB master. The Slate depends on its USB master to support an external keyboard and an external CD/BD drive (and maybe a mouse). Can you do that with the iPad?

The iPad has a custom processor running 1 GHZ. (Don't tell me. "Megahertz myth.") I don't see any indication that it has an SDXC port.

Apple's page doesn't say how much RAM the iPad has. The Slate is stated to be 2GB, which is completely reasonable for a low-powered 32-bit machine.

It looks like they're using exactly the same display.

I looked more carefully at the Slate PDF, and it does say what connectors are on the dock: 2 USB ports, one HDMI connector. No ethernet, and I assume both USB ports are masters.

Which means that modified sneaker-net (SDXC) really would be my only way to network, unless I buy a WiFi hub, which I'm not eager to do.

A bunch of my neighbors have WiFi. When I let Uiharu seek, it finds six. (One of which is named "NETGEAR"...)

6 David, even my iPaq can play video without skipping, albeit at its full screen resolution of 640*480. And that processor is only running 624 MHz.

7 Performance should be comparable to a decent 10-inch netbook, given that it has pretty much the same components. Same HD video accelerator, too, which it's easy to find positive reviews of.

-j

8 "it's HP, a brand I haven't trusted with portable computers for a while." I bought an HP laptop in January, and in August it started acting up. I've sent it back to them twice now and it has come back not properly repaired. I just sent it out for round 3 this week. 10 years ago I bought an HP desktop, and it failed, and they cross-shipped me a new one. They're not the company they used to be.

9

I think this is coming from the group that built my iPaq, not  the group that designs their computers.

Also, this product is targeted at large corporations. (It isn't even listed in the home/homeoffice section of their site.) Such customers won't put up with poor quality, and they are repeat customers.

All of which is me rationalizing that maybe it'll be fine. (Damn, I really want one.)

10 "I think this is coming from the group that built my iPaq, not the group that designs their computers." It COULD be, but since it is an Atom running Windows, it seems unlikely. The Atom is a Pentium 4 class CPU (approximately), it's just missing some features like out-of-order execution, btw. I mean, heck, I understand the idea of wanting something that looks cool, and to be honest, my anecdote is just that. But you've always had more trouble with your iPaq that in seems to me you should, too.

11 It's a keyboard-less touchscreen netbook.  Given that netbooks are running ~$300-$400, and decent full-up laptops start ~$100 above that, you're paying basically double for the lighter form factor.

David:  Samsung is coming out with the Galaxy Tab.  It's basically the guts of their Galaxy S line of smartphones in a tablet, pretty much identical to the way that the iPad is really just a big iPhone with no phone radio.

One of the things that irritates me the most about Steve Jobs is his refusal to actually let you use "his" devices.  They took away the floppy drive 2-3 years before flash was ready to replace it.  They took away USB ports on their handhelds, and removed the battery cover so those devices have a built-in lifespan that lasts only for as many charging cycles as the battery can take.  I'll cut the rant short here, and get to the point--I am far more interested in devices like this HP tablet that let me plug in accessories, and I think that's the way of the future.  I foresee (and I've seen other people, including a Motorola(?) exec, say basically the same thing) that in 10-15 years, we'll have "PCs" that are the size of today's smartphones, designed to plug into (wired or unwired) any accessory you can think of, from monitors and keyboards to sunglasses with display capability.  I also suspect that flash will eventually crowd out HDDs in most consumer usage, because at some point the $/GB will be so low that most people will have more space than they bother to fill up.

12

Rick, it's true that I had some considerable problems with Uiharu. Back when I was still able to work, I mainly worked on embedded software. And no company I ever worked for would have shipped a product in this state.

The way that the USB port gets wedged, and the fact that the only way to get it back is to use the reset button, is scandalous. It would be scandalous from a no-name company. Having HP let something like that out the door is doubly so.

But, well, I'm still glad I bought it, especially now that I know how to work around the problem. And I don't think there's ever been a computer, or operating system on that computer, that didn't have at least something I had to learn to work around.

13

Given that netbooks are running ~$300-$400, and decent full-up laptops start ~$100 above that, you're paying basically double for the lighter form factor.

Actually, it looks like the main thing you're paying for is the 64G SSD. I just went over to NewEgg and did a search in their netbook section, and none of them were listed as having more than 16G. The only device with 32G was a discontinued data slab, like the Slate. There were no devices with 64G of SSD.

SSDs just plain aren't cheap.

Also, most of the netbooks I looked at had 1G of RAM. The Slate 500 has 2G.

And the netbooks had slower processors, and less powerful graphics accelerators. (And no touch screen.) I don't think HP is massively overcharging for this.

14 True enough; the SSD price brackets still throw me for a bit of a loop; 4x16GB SD (or even 4x16GB microSD, which would take up about the same space as 1xSD) runs you ~$80 online.  I don't know whether it's a speed thing, a reliability thing, or what, but SSDs somehow seem to command a huge premium.

RAM, even laptop-sized RAM, is pretty cheap.  Not sure about phone-sized RAM, though, since those are usually on-board and fixed.

Can't really speak to the graphics card, either; the pricing on those things gets kinda "spooky".  Which makes sense, in a way, because they can arguably be more complex and powerful than the CPU itself.  I do know that some of the new netbook/phone CPUs are about to start getting on-chip GPUs to save size/heat/money, but the price and performance of all that stuff is very opaque to me.

15 It's size. It costs to make things small and compact.

16

These guys have one. They don't seem to be too impressed. But they're being snide about it, and I don't think I trust them.

Still, the pictures are nice. There's a picture of it next to an iPad, and it's somewhat smaller. But I think that's because the bezel is smaller; I think the displays are the same size. (It's hard to tell for sure.)

17 No, the displays are not the same size. Apple says its display is 9.7 inches. The HP display is 8.9 inch.

18 I can't stand it. I just ordered one.

19

By the way, it's going to be named Saten.

20 "No flashy abilities, but doesn't give up and gets things done?" It could work!

21 I'll be watching for the review!  I like the idea of tablets, but the iPad is so locked down I'm just not interested.

22

Some of the comments on that article I just linked to say that "WebOS" would be better. What they're talking about is the OS that was developed by Palm, I think.

Anyway, the point is that it isn't Windows. They seem to think that's a good thing. I don't. I recognize that Windows isn't really very well suited for a touch-pad interface, but the other side of it is that it runs standard Windows apps -- and that's huge.

Irrespective of any other virtues it might have, the iPad has the huge disadvantage of being chained to Apple's app store. That alone is enough to disqualify it for me. It isn't your computer, it's Apple's computer that they deign to let you use, but only if you use it the way they say you should use it.

23 Exactly.  I don't know how well Windows will work out as a tablet OS, but it is at least your computer.  If a third-party developer comes up with a better interface that sits on top of Windows, HP and Microsoft have no say in the matter.

Apple's approach is barely acceptable for phones; for anything supposed to be a general-purpose device, it's a deal-breaker.

24 Given their bitter history in the tablet arena, I'd take anything Crunchgear says about it with at least a few grains of salt.

As for Windows' suitability for tablet use, I know a number of people with convertible tablets running everything from XP to 7, and the biggest problem with the older ones was the quality of the pen input; the Windows support is actually quite mature. (the only downside is that full Japanese handwriting recognition requires buying either the language pack or an Ultimate license; fortunately, as a former employee, I get a steep discount when buying for self or friends)

I've been tempted for a long time by the Lenovo convertible tablets, but the S10-3T doesn't have the screen quality, active digitizer, or HD acceleration that the Slate promises, and the various X-series tablets are just too expensive. The Slate looks like it will outperform the S10-3T in all ways, at half the weight. (and I should note that the Lenovo is $599 with an official SRP of $699, which makes the Slate look pretty reasonable)

-j

25 Samsung Galaxy Tab sounds interesting (in WiFi-only version, of course - carrier versions are going to be crippled). Samsung used to be the king of openness when Galaxy S started shipping.

26 Do they use press-and-hold for the equivalent of a mouse right-click? That's what the iPaq uses.

27 The Galaxy S line runs Android, so yeah, right-click is a long press.

I'm interested to see what MS winds up bringing to the table with their app store; you would think, given the history, that a Windows-based store would be a key advantage for them, but they're so many years behind Apple and Google by now that I dunno.  It may partly depend on how well stuff can run across the full and phone versions of W7.  If they can make "develop once, run anywhere" a reality, that would get them back into the game, by leveraging the large PC base out there.

That said, they're up against a lot of existing apps, including stuff like Google's very impressive free stuff (Maps, Earth, and my favorite, Sky), which Google may choose not to port to W7 (but then, they might, if app/browser/search engine usage is more important than OS market share, which may be the case).

1 So I Googled "SASI".

Result #3:

"New SaSi Sex Toy Gets Intelligent With Your Nether Regions"

(O_O)

#7 was the definition I was looking for:  "Shugart Associates System Interface".

...been a damn long time since I heard the name "Shugart".

2

SASI was in its final throes when I bought mine, replaced shortly thereafter by SCSI and IDE.

3 Make a batch file to do the copy, and then use a terminal session just to set up a scheduler job to execute that batch file.  Then you won't have to have the terminal session open for the copy process.  I'd probably make a test script that copies just one or two files to figure out the process, then break it down to a few gigs per batch so you don't face any time-out issues.  But even with trial and error and setup, it should be way faster than any other reasonable option.

4 Do I lose geek cred points for having never heard of a SASI drive?

5

David:

I hate unsolicited suggestions and advice.

6

Wonderduck: No, not really. SASI was never a very popular standard.

There was a guy I knew at the time who was a real fanatic about the OS-9 operating system. (Which had nothing to do with Apple; it was an Unix-alike designed for the Motorola 6809 microprocessor.)

He had designed a disk interface for his own 6809 system, and written a driver for it. He gave me that driver, and designed a disk interface for the Coco, which I built using wirewrap. (There's another of those terms that show how old and dusty I am.)

And the reason it used a SASI drive is that it's what he knew. Didn't make any difference to me either way, as long as it worked.

7 Wirewrap.  Good lord.  I did that a few times back in the day, though my little group of geeks knew it as 'spaghettiing.'

8 I remember OS-9 (I had a Coco 2).

Amazingly powerful OS for an 8-bit system.  And it's still around.

9 I couldn't tell if you knew this or not, but USB3 is already here (except, as you point out, you'd have to buy new hardware.) I was doing some copying of about half a gig of stuff from a hard drive onto a second drive on the same PATA controller, and it was getting about 28MB/s. I remember reading something on a tech blog recently that if you turn off write caching, you might get up to 100MB/s. There are obvious drawbacks to that, however.

10

Does that 3 TB USB drive also come with an eSATA port like the one on the back of your Acer Easystore?

11 No, it does not. There are only two connectors: a concentric power connector and a mini-USB connector.

12 That's a shame. eSATA would have given you USB3.0 speed.

13

I think the limiting factor is going to be the drive, in fact.

It's not like this is going to be something I do once a week. More like once every 6 months. A couple of hours one way or the other isn't really very important. And there's no way that a 1.3 TB copy is going to be quick, no matter how it's done.

14

You are right.  TB sized transfers are painful no matter what, even though eSATA/USB3 is noticeably quicker for such large transfers. If you are concerned about using CPU cycles uring remote desktop, just exit out of it after initiating the copy -- it will continue.

15

I'm not really worried about Remote Desktop. Again, if it were something I was doing weekly, it would be worthwhile to make some sort of effort to optimize. But for something that only happens a couple of times per year, I'll just put up with it.

And I don't suppose you noticed the part where I said I didn't want any suggestions, did you? (sob. How can I make it any more plain? Put it in big red letters over the top rotation picture?)

16 Sorry, Stephen, I did notice but I was trying to demonstrate the problem with your unsolicited advice/suggestion policy. For example, my first question was advice purposely disguised as an innocent question. Let's rephrase to clarify: If you want USB3 speed you might want to consider an eSATA drive that has both USB2 and eSATA ports since your EasyStore has an eSATA port and eSATA has about the same bandwidth as USB3. My last comment was actually a clarification of your statement that I purposely phrased in the form of advice, even though it technically wasn't. Again, let's rephrase to clarify: The appalling amount of CPU time expended using remote desktop can be helped simply by exiting out of the remote desktop session and permitting the file transfer to continue. The problem isn't that your requests not to make unwanted suggestions aren't sufficiently plain or noticeable (they are), the problem is that you are failing to recognize that statements such as: 1. "But Remote Desktop consumes an appalling amount of CPU time both on the server and on the terminal computer. Probably can't be helped," and 2. "USB3 can't come soon enough! (Except that I'd have to buy all new equipment to take advantage of it.)" are being viewed as invitations for advice by your readers in the context of the post. That's the reason why these "advice" incidents keep occurring with a comical frequency. And for you readers: phrase your advice in the form of comments/questions if you feel compelled to give advice and to avoid pissing off Stephen.

17

KDerosa, do you think I am stupid? I understand that often advice can be phrased as questions -- and I hate that, too. The reason I didn't blow up at you is because I'm trying to be a good host, even for bad guests who deliberately flaunt the rules.

This thread is now closed.