You Can't Get There From Here

Unusually, I have a little money in my pocket at the moment, so I wanted to finally upgrade my monitor, which is currently a 19" model a few years old.  It is a very nice 19" monitor, but it's still a 19" monitor.  And I blew up the DVI input for Christmas, so it's currently VGA only.

In shopping around, I discovered the new Samsung T series monitors.  The T240HD and T260HD in particular have exactly the features I want.  If I could buy two, today, I would.

I can't.  They aren't available in Australia at all.  None of the T series are.

The other thing I'd like is a good way to run some virtual servers.  VMWare Server was just that.  However, you can't run version 1 on Vista 64 - Vista 64 demands signed drivers, and VMWare Server doesn't have signed drivers - and while I could run it just fine on Linux, I couldn't access the remote console because you can't run it on Vista 64 and I can't connect my Linux box to my monitor because the DVI port is dead so I only have the one input and I can't get a new monitor because the one I actually want isn't available and if I buy one I don't want then the next day the one I want will show up and I'll be out four hundred bucks.

VMWare Server 2 beta runs on Vista 64.  VMWare Server 2 beta is a bloated piece of crap.  They replaced the very functional remote console with a hideous browser-based bit of crapware that requires you to install Apache and Tomcat just to administer your virtual machines.  Leading to a situation where the VMWare Server download is 25 times the size of the comparable VirtualBox installer.

On the other hand, VirtualBox crashes horribly when you try to run Centos 5.2 as a guest.

If I could get virtual servers running nicely on my Linux box, I'd quite like to upgrade it to 12GB of memory using the new 4GB DIMMs that are available, for instance, from Kingston.  They're a little pricey, but they allow me to put up to 16GB of memory on a $100 motherboard instead of needing a $700 motherboard.

You can't get them in Australia.  Not even from Kingston's Australian office.  Who aren't answering my emails.

I'd quite like to upgrade the mu.nu server to 12GB of memory as well.  I can't get that either.  I'd have to do a server swap, which takes about 48 hours even if I spend two weeks planning it in advance.

And then there's semi-automated online stores.  Yes, I know it's the 3rd of July over there, but when I place an order for a downloadable software product, I don't expect the date or time to matter.  I expect instant fulfillment.  I can't rant about Digital Anarchy, though, because even though their ordering system requires human intervention, a human actually intervened and got my order shipped in a few minutes at 8pm their time.  So, um, good for them.

Where was I?  Oh yeah, my order for something - presumably either  Adobe Design Premium CS 3.3 or my new quad-core CPU - decided to arrive the moment I'm out of the office for four days.  Though I could pop into the city tomorrow if I really wanted to.  And I have the trial version of Photoshop to tide me over.

And OCZ have just announced the database-administrator-on-a-budget's wet dream: A 2.5" SATA flash-based SSD, boasting 120MB/s reads, 80MB/s writes, 0.3ms access times, MTBF of 1.5 million hours, and a price between $4 and $5 per GB.  32GB model is $169; 64GB model is $259; 128GB model is $479.  Again, if I could buy two of the 32GB models right this second, I would, but they aren't available in Australia.  Though again in this instance I can't complain too much, because they're apparently not going to be officially launched until next Monday.

Meh.  I think I'll go to lunch.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:19 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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