Liberty Corner Computing Company

Archive for the ‘Hardware’ Category

I have a lot of old computer parts and don’t know what to do with them.

Items include:
- keyboards
- old computer towers
- old HP printer
- old dial up modems

Is there a place to recycle this items? Do you get a price for giving them to companies who may want to recycle them? I doubt anyone would want to buy them on an online auction site (eg eBay) unless I am wrong… Basic keyboards now you can get for 5.99 and mother of the bride dresses starting at 190.00. Dialup modem, if in working order, you can still sell for probably 5-10 dollars�new is about 35 bucks, internal and about 40 bucks external.
Towers, if the power supply is higher then 250 volts you can get for it maybe 10 dollars�I say maybe because with all the gadgets today attached in the computers, specially if people play games with a powerful chip and video cards needing good cooling, everyone needs 300 to 350 power supply, maybe even more. Old Hp if not used by now has blocked jets by dried out ink.

Try giving it to Salvation army, they sell keyboards and some other electrical appliances�they might take it. Or just take it to your local tip�now all the tips have section where they separate parts for recycling�they should know what to do with it. Local computer clubs usually provide systems to the poor families, children, schools, and charities.

Many clubs, plus the charity thrift stores, put a very fast operating system, like http://www.mepis.org on the towers, and set up a full system to donate or sell cheap. Otherwise, you will be drinking the 8 pounds of toxins, cadmium, lead, that leach into water shed, from the land fill, from each tower and monitor that is dumped!

Many of us recycle the stuff we can’t use or sell, dismantling old plastics and metals, and getting paid for the steel, copper, aluminum, and the GOLD that fills old computers! Some professional recyclers have found tons of money in some of the chips on the boards!

No money, often, if you don’t dismantle them down to the recycle material! You usually get naught, or even pay, for them to take the entire lot! Many of us use towers and desktops of 100mhz to 800mhz speed without any monitor, as a hardware firewall/router, for upto 36 networked clients. http://ipcop.org has the FREE program with instructions.

Many of us find that 400mhz and faster units work well as a network file server in our home or small office networks! The secret is to run one of the 800 FREE fast OSes! http://livecdlist.com http://distrowatch.com

The use of a domain-specific language, or DSL, is becoming a realistic and even necessary solution for software developers on all sorts of software development projects. You’ve heard about DSLs, and you may know that DSLs are divided into a few different styles, internal and external. But what is an internal DSL and external DSL? When would you decide to use one or the other? And, primarily, how would you go about developing a complex external DSL? This article answers these questions, with a focus on developing a complex external DSL.

Defining Domain-Specific Language

A domain-specific language (DSL) is a computer language that is developed to specialize in addressing the needs of a given problem domain. The domain itself could be many things. It could be specific to an industry, such as insurance, education, aerospace, medicine, etc., or to a technology or methodology, such as JEE, .NET, database, services, messaging, architecture, or domain-driven design.

The reason I would develop a DSL is to make dealing with a set of challenges in a domain I am working in more elegant and easier to deal with. That’s because the language I create will be just what I need to address my unique set of challenges, and no more than that. And of course, if I provide my language for others to use it may have to broaden a bit to address what they need, but still nothing more. The effort has the goal of making it feel more natural to use the DSL than to use a general purpose programming language or some other non-targeted tool.

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As you may know most external drive enclosures do pretty much the same thing. They allow a simple method of adding additional external storage to your system and allow you to take this on the go if needed. In my opinion, the differences between these units fall under three main categories.

1. Quality. Is the unit built cheaply or is it designed to last? Does the unit keep the drive from baking itself? (Heat is the enemy you know)
2. Ease of use. Is the unit designed in such a way to allow easy installation and removal of the drive(s) you have?
3. Features. Does the unit allow for multiple connectivity options? Will it do your taxes for you? (well maybe not the last part)

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Western Digital’s Caviar Green is the first hard drive to offer an impressive 2 TB of capacity. Seagate has also introduced a new drive, the Barracuda 7200.12, but its capacity only spans up to 1 TB. Samsung recently launched its Spinpoint F2 EcoGreen drive with 500 GB of capacity, though that one will ramp up to 1.5 TB soon.

All these drives feature the same 500 GB per-platter capacity, but that is all they have in common. We look at which drive offers the best value for your money.

Performance Versus Capacity

While desktop hard drives used to be based exclusively on 7,200 RPM spindle speeds, combining both high performance and high capacity, the market is clearly moving in a different direction now. We still expect many, if not most drives to be one-for-all products, meaning that the majority of hard drives will deliver high performance and large capacities. However, the disk drive market is splitting into two segments. There will be more products with a focus on performance, such as flash solid-state drives (SSDs) and high-performance drives like Western Digital’s VelociRaptor. There will also be storage hard drives and solutions geared for higher capacity at the expense of performance.

Performance- Versus Storage-Oriented Drives

Performance-oriented drives are expected to run fast when speed especially counts for operating systems and applications. Obviously, flash SSDs, such as Intel’s X25-M, deliver maximum throughput of over 200 MB/s with almost no access time. These drives don’t even consume a lot of power.

Storage-oriented drives, on the other hand, usually offer spindle speeds of 5,400 RPM or 7,200 RPM and are geared for backup, whether you are storing photo, music, or video files. These storage-oriented drives offer capacities of up to 2 TB offer and have sufficient performance for less performance-driven applications.

Low Power Trends

The IT industry continues to jump on the low-power bandwagon, but much hype remains. For example, we believe that low power should not be touted as an extra feature, but should instead be a basic requirement for each and every product. Samsung’s Spinpoint F2 EcoGreen and the Western Digital Caviar Green address this hype by focusing on high capacity per watt. Effectively, they represent nice storage drives according to our definition. In the case of the new Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 desktop hard drive, Seagate seeks to the HDD performance crown, but as our benchmarks show, the competition is stiff.