I just discovered that, joy of joys, there is a way to block adverts in the Windows 8 metro browser (the same one that doesn’t support any addons, the conventional way of blocking this kind of content).
The geniuses over at the Fanboy Adblock Homepage have setup a list that is update weekly, that can be added to Internet Explorers do not track list, which blocks their content ever getting passed to the browser.
Simple, elegant and very effective.
Love this advert, I remember having some this hardware for my first PC, from Reddit
This looks like the business server to beat, even if it does come with a $1449 price tag for the 8tb version…
This great looking server comes in either 4TB or 8TB configurations and can be further expanded thanks to its 2 x USB 3.0 ports. Powered by an Intel Atom 1.8 GHz dual core processor and 2GB of RAM the WD Sentinel DX4000 features an LCD display panel on the front of the unit which displays system status and critical alerts and comes complete with dual Gigabit Ethernet configured in Adaptive Fault
Equipped with WD’s Enterprise Class WD RE drives these can be configured as a RAID 1 array (2 drives only) or a RAID 5 array (3-4 drives), the WD Sentinel DX4000 can hold up to 4 SATA hard drives.
via mswhs.com
I’ve recently upgraded my Homeserver to the latest 1.5ghz version, more out of curiosity than necessity, luckily I could use the same 2tb samsung hard disks, as the price has lept almost 400% in the last month. I was interested to see how the performance differs from the original machine so I ran the latest Passmark benchmarks against each machine (for reference the 1.3 version has been upgraded to 4gb ram and the new 1.5 version has the standard 2gb ram it ships with).
| AMD Athlon II Neo N36L Dual-Core 1.3ghz | AMD Turion II Neo N40L Dual-Core 1.5ghz | |
| CPU Mark | 862.9 | 959.8 |
| 2D Graphics Mark | 111.1 | 131.4 |
| Memory Mark | 257.3 | 293.9 |
| Disk Mark | 550.4 | 593.3 |
| PassMark Rating | 409.5 | 465.2 |
The numbers stack up in an interesting way, the process came out 11% faster (rather than the 15% on paper you would expect), but it also helps to boost all the peripheral parts of the server that you wouldn’t expect to get a boost, disk performance goes up by almost 8% and the overall score by 13%.
Obviously it’s not going to be a compelling upgrade for most existing owners, but for new buyers still a great deal, at £250 in most stores, with £100 cash back from HP. I’d love to see a Core i3 version of the server, as there will always be users wanted to do more video compression, I’m looking forward to seeing if this new faster processor can keep up with the new quad tv tuner I have on order to work with DVBlink on the Microserver.
On paper it should be been the perfect upgrade, after a year of using the old mac mini I decided to splash out on a new Core i5 based 2011 Mac mini, it’s advantages of a faster processor and better video card, that I was going to use for recording more HD streams in Media Center, it’s is disadvantages of the lack of an internal DVD didn’t bother me as it’s been years since I had last needed on.
Sadly in practice my experience with the mac mini is that Apple have over stretched the design of the previous generation’s case, by including such a powerful processor the lack of space for cooling has impacted my intended use as a Windows Media Center replacement. When pushed by recording a HD stream and playing back a HD recording the noise is distinctly noticeable over the programs audio, which is a terrible shame as I am sure the Core2duo based Mac Mini will struggle whilst recording multiple HD streams. I currently only have a the capability to record two HD channels, but even when doing this and playing an existing HD recording the old mac mini produces no noise what so ever.
If there is an answer I believe it lays with the Macbook Air, a fantastic fast laptop that produces very little noise or heat except in normal use, it does it by using a mobile version of the Core process. I don’t understand why Apple decided to jump from a laptop class processor to a desktop one in their latest Mac Mini designs, the ultra low version of the processor makes so much more sense for the Mini’s small case design.
Lets hope this is just a glitch and that the next generation will return the Mac Mini to it’s cool and quite state of mind. I for one will be keeping the old design and crossing my fingers it has the legs to keep up with todays growing HD content demands.
I was very happy to see Blackgold have updated their site to annonce the price of their Quad Freeview HD tuner I think is so ripe to upgrade to. Still a low profile single antenna input card which delivers 4 streams of HD television goodness in the UK (but given their are only 4 HD channels it can still be used for all the normal freeview services as well).
The best bit? They’re only selling it for £139 (plus VAT and delivery, which should round up to around £176.70). That’s still an absolute deal if you need 4 tuners in your media center system (or as I have done just hooked the whole think to a DVBlink server, which lets you stream to any device).
Now let me preorder it and I’ll happily hand over some cash!
via BGT3650