Computers – APSoft

End of an Era: Fry’s Closes Doors

The phrase “End of an Era” sounds cliche, but in this case it really is the end of an era. Fry’s Electronics was the last bastion of geekdom, it was the WalMart of electronics/computing/snacks. The closing of Fry’s Electronics bookends the era that I grew up in.

Fry’s Electronics wasn’t especially good at any one thing, what they lacked in specificity was made up for in grandeur and selection. If you wanted to buy an external DVD drive, they had 40 different examples in different speeds, dual layer, not dual layer, R/W, ROM, etc. If you needed some RAM for your computer, you could choose from 10 different manufacturers in different speeds and densities. What Fry’s brought to the table was an overwhelming volume of stock on hand. If you NEEDED a new hard disk right now, you could hop over to Fry’s and get one.

Fry’s was the last of the original electronics retailers in Silicon Valley, they were the biggest and outlasted the rest. Storied institutions such as WeirdStuff and Halted’s (HSC Electronic Supply) to the more obscure shops such as A-Z Surplus and Action Computer, and companies such as NCA computer tried to compete with Fry’s, but loss leaders every week are hard to compete with.

Rabbit Holes and Time Sinks

This article is as much a piece of documentation as it is commentary. I recently decided to rejigger my home network after being quite comfortable in the current configuration for almost 7 years. The impetus was actually quite simple: one day I suddenly got paranoid when I realized what damage could be done if someone compromised my personal account. I am reasonably careful and competent about how I run things, but in spite of how careful I am, the services I’ve added in the last year increase the attack surface of my home network considerably. I would be foolish to ignore the increased risk these services pose.

Rabbit holes can be interesting or frustrating distractions to a relatively direct plan or process. Sometimes those rabbit holes turn from distractions into time sinks. Getting my home network upgrade completed was filled with both rabbit holes and time sinks. This isn’t the first major upgrade I’ve been involved in, I’ve moved datacenters multiple times, deployed new services, migrated services, but I’ve never had to completely duplicate all running services while also juggling new firewalls and network renumbers.

In Defense of Old Tech: Why a 10 year old Xeon could be your next computer

I had the opportunity to acquire some Enterprise hardware from a former employer. This hardware is equipment I purchased and built when I worked there, almost 10 years ago. At the time, I was trying to balance cost with performance, some of the components were not top of the line and others were performant for the day.

In all I acquired a couple LGA771 dual socket 2U systems and a 4U system with a 24 drive enclosure and LGA1366 Xeon. All systems had Adaptec 5x05Z RAID controllers with 2TB Seagate drives. The LGA1366 Xeon is/was relatively modern because it represents the first generation of the Core i series architecture. The LGA1366 E5500 Xeons have a base clock of 133Mhz with 3 memory channels, and 4.8GT/s, 5.6GT/s, or 6.4GT/s transfer rates on the QPI bus. Depending on the model number, the max memory speeds are 800Mhz, 1066Mhz, or 1333Mhz.