Hats off to Nine Inch Nails for dishing out multiple albums in a year. Ghosts 1-4 was amazing and The Slip is even better. What's very cool is that Ghosts 1 is free and the 2-4 can be purchased for $5. What's even cooler is that the entire album of The Slip is under the Creative Commons license...making it free to download/own/play/edit/remix/share/do whatever with! That's when you know the artist really just loves his music, loves making music, and loves sharing it with the world.
I hope other artists start to follow the path of Trent Reznor.
The internet is really changing the way content is produced and delivered. The record companies are really scared now that people are trending towards downloading digital music and not purchasing the hard copies they used to rip people off for. I personally however wouldn't download music. I'd rather have the hard copy. Why? Well it gives me a sense of ownership and plus I love album art. But still, I think it's funny that the record companies who are used to making millions are finding themselves loosing more and more due to this issue. Artists can now charge a fraction of what the record companies charged, and still make a lot more than what the record companies paid them for making the music...so now it's good for both the artist and consumer without the evil greedy middle man.
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
NAS troubles
I have been trying to find a solution to problem in my home IT world. I want a server, but not a server. Something that will always serve content and be a central storage area. I don't want a server because they are traditionally loud and expensive and power hungry, which means I would have to pay more for power every month. What to do?
I bought 2 500 GB hard drives and a Galaxy RAID-Pro NAS system. It had some cool features like it was stylish, small, fairly quiet and didn't eat up much power. It also had a Bit Torrent feature where you can download a torrent file without having your computer on...it would download everything to the NAS itself. I also bought it because it held 2 drives in RAID 0 or 1. I definately needed something that can be easily backed up and mirroring with RAID 1 was a great option. So where did this all go wrong?
Well the Galaxy NAS advertised that its speed was at 1 Gbps...and in reality it was definately slower...it only transfered at like 30 MB/s...which is TERRIBLE if you have a lot of stuff. Also, the web interface was very basic and crashed frequently, which made things a lot more annoying. The biggest turn off was the fact that playing video from the NAS was so slow that the video was pausing very frequently making it unwatchable.
I returned it. That thing was very inconvenient and getting my stuff OFF of the drives was somewhat challenging since the filesystem was EXT2, which no OS uses anymore except Linux...which I only have as a virtual machine...and didn't work. So I used the Ubuntu LiveCD to get everything off and that worked great. Lesson learned: don't buy cheap stuff when it comes to technology...you will be disappointed.
I bought a Buffalo TeraStation Live instead. It was considerably more money *cough* $450 *cough* but it seems to be working very well. Unlike the Galaxy, this thing is much faster and offers a lot more features. The web access feature is very nice, allowing me to access my NAS from anywhere on the internet. It also allows me to stream music!
I bought 2 500 GB hard drives and a Galaxy RAID-Pro NAS system. It had some cool features like it was stylish, small, fairly quiet and didn't eat up much power. It also had a Bit Torrent feature where you can download a torrent file without having your computer on...it would download everything to the NAS itself. I also bought it because it held 2 drives in RAID 0 or 1. I definately needed something that can be easily backed up and mirroring with RAID 1 was a great option. So where did this all go wrong?
Well the Galaxy NAS advertised that its speed was at 1 Gbps...and in reality it was definately slower...it only transfered at like 30 MB/s...which is TERRIBLE if you have a lot of stuff. Also, the web interface was very basic and crashed frequently, which made things a lot more annoying. The biggest turn off was the fact that playing video from the NAS was so slow that the video was pausing very frequently making it unwatchable.
I returned it. That thing was very inconvenient and getting my stuff OFF of the drives was somewhat challenging since the filesystem was EXT2, which no OS uses anymore except Linux...which I only have as a virtual machine...and didn't work. So I used the Ubuntu LiveCD to get everything off and that worked great. Lesson learned: don't buy cheap stuff when it comes to technology...you will be disappointed.
I bought a Buffalo TeraStation Live instead. It was considerably more money *cough* $450 *cough* but it seems to be working very well. Unlike the Galaxy, this thing is much faster and offers a lot more features. The web access feature is very nice, allowing me to access my NAS from anywhere on the internet. It also allows me to stream music!
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