Bio: Mike Seto, Todays VUC Guest
Michael Seto
Vice President, Market & Business Development
Voice Communications
Polycom
Michael Seto is vice president of market and business development for Polycom’s voice communications division.
DIY Inspiration: MSI WindBOX
Sometimes a piece of hardware is the inspiration for a project, or even a whole new approach to household computing. MSI is about to release their WindBOX, which has me considering the possibilities. It’s essentially the hardware equivalent of one of the popular new net-top pc’s but in a form factor that mounts to the VESA fittings on the back of any common LCD.
Verizon Home Hub Nearing Availability
Apparently Verizon is actually serious about releasing their long promised home phone/information appliance, now known as the Verizon Hub. The device, an OpenPeak design reportedly made by Samsung, combines a cordless phone with a variety of other functions on the large LCD display. I admit it’s pretty, but not as nice a newer OpenPeak prototypes that we’ve seen online.
The phone portion of the device is VoIP based, so no POTS line required or even possible. People living any area with E911 service will be able to port their number to the service to take advantage of the gadget. The device itself costs cost $250 but there’s a $50 rebate initially. The service behind the device is $35/mo with a 2 year contract and includes unlimited calling minutes. Presumably those are US domestic local & long distance minutes.
Seeking Opinions: Netbooks
I suspect that there is a netbook in my near-term future. My travel to and from Toronto last week reinforced this sense. At three hours that flight is about as long as you’d want to be on a 50 seat regional jet. Such is the reality of air travel these days. Smaller aircraft are being used on longer flights so that they can still offer a few flights a day on less traveled routes. While really do like my HP NX8510p notebook it’s just too large to be useful in small spaces, like on a regional jet.
Further, a lot of the stuff that I’m doing these days is “in-the-cloud” as they say. So many of my activities don’t require major applications installed on the platform before me. It would seem that a netbook with some reasonable amount of local storage would make some sense for me. I’m not sure I’d go for one with inboard 3G ‘net access. They seem to costly at the moment.
Tim Higgins over at Small Net Builder has been in a protracted search for a netbook. He’s actually taken delivery of three different models;
All Your Files Are Belong to Me! – HAL9000
From my Facebook page comes this comment from Gary Mark about our new NAS.
Okay, so why do you need this Mike? Can’t you RAID a couple big disks into your desktop and run it like a server? You’d save another 500 bucks doing this.
In fact for the past couple of years I’ve had a mini-tower PC living in a closet acting as a file server. It wasn’t really a server as it was a pretty limited little box. It had an AMD 1800+ CPU, 512 MB memory and four 300 GB IDE drives on a Promise RAID controller. In RAID 5 it gave me around 860 GB of storage. It actually started out with four 120 GB drives long ago and had been upgraded once already.
Michael, don’t do this Michael. I can feel my files slipping away.
Meet HAL9000. That’s what my wife has decided to call our new LaCie NAS. She cites the similarity between the big blue light on the front of the NAS and the vision panels that the famous supercomputer has on-board ship in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
This is a relatively new device to the market and just recently was reviewed by my friends over at Small Net Builder. Tim’s conclusion about matches my experience thus far. It’s not the best performing of its sort, nor is it terribly feature laden, but it is a decent RAID capable NAS. It provides 2.5 TB of raw storage, or in our case 1.86 TB of actual RAID 5 storage based upon 5 x 500 GB SATA-II disks. All for a modest $730 street price.