My gods J.C.Staff, you cer­tainly never run out of ways to enter­tain us. As if Rail­gun episode 10 wasn’t explo­sive enough, you have to raise this flag to pull my atten­tion in with this amaz­ing amalgamation:

Uni­ver­sal OS Macin­dows EXP with a sig­na­ture Outel Out­side marker! In a world when Macs were com­pat­i­ble with every­thing and not over­loaded with pre-programmed set­tings, and when Win­dows actu­ally have good processor/RAM uti­liza­tion.  On that note, I won­der what Macin­dows BST is a ref­er­ence of?

Sorry Ubunchu, but the pen­guin had been hand­ily given the boot. Read the rest of this entry »

Released as a mas­cot and spe­cial bonus fea­ture to the Japan­ese Win­dows 7 Ulti­mate edi­tion, Nanami Madobe quickly gains fame in the otaku com­mu­nity as the lat­est and most adorable of the OS-tans. Wide­spread pop­u­lar­ity was then estab­lished when the cel­e­brated seiyuu (voice actress) and singer Nana Mizuki was hired to serve as the voice of Nanami-tan. As one might guess, the name Nanami is a word­play on the seiyuu’s name and the Japan­ese proun­ci­a­tion of seven (“nana”).

Only in Japan…

What­ever else one might say about Microsoft as a com­pany, you got to admit that their Japan­ese branch sure has awe­some mar­ket­ing ideas. I can’t pro­vide fac­tual sources here, but I’m sure will­ing to bet that a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of the Japanese’s younger techie com­mu­nity — those most picky about their oper­at­ing sys­tem choices — are at least mod­er­ated involved in the Japan­ese visual cul­ture, bet­ter known as their anime/manga otaku cul­ture. Mak­ing Win­dows 100% more moé is cer­tainly one sure­fire way of mak­ing sure at least one of their machines, likely the most often used one, is run­ning it.

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So I finally got tired of hav­ing both my backup server and net­work share server down and decided to do some­thing about it. Unfor­tu­nately, rebuild­ing both of them is not cost-effective at the time since com­pletely rebuild­ing the Solaris Raid-Z server I used for back­ups and the Cen­tOS 5 server I used for net­work shares would involve siz­able expen­di­ture of both money and time (which as we all know equals money). So I ended up look­ing around for some­thing a lit­tle more bud­getable and ended up find­ing the Acer Aspire Easy­s­tore H340, which Newegg.com sells for $379.00. The H340 runs Win­dows Home Server, which I used sev­eral times set­ting up home media net­works for clients while I was in col­lege. It’s essen­tially a stripped down ver­sion of Win­dows Server 2003, with­out all the fun that is con­fig­ur­ing a Server 2003 instal­la­tion from scratch (which I’ve done more times than I want to think about). Microsoft released it a few years back in the hope they could get peo­ple to start using cen­tral loca­tions in their homes for back­ing up and stor­ing media to play on their var­i­ous com­put­ers and Xbox 360s. Of course, Linux did this ages ago and I’d been using Linux and Solaris servers to do back­ups and share media until their hard dri­ves crapped out on me over the past year.

Win­dows Home Server Console

(Run­down and more details after the break)

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