Friday 11 January 2008

Pic of the day: I stole this picture from their site. I doubt they'll sue me though.

Stay-at-home server

"Mommy, why is there a server in the house?"

Microsoft has published a beautiful and cuddly book for small children, completely and utterly in the same style as "where do babies come from", but about servers. "When a mommy and a daddy love each other very much, the daddy wants to give the mommy a special gift." (That gift would be the MS Home Server.)

From the workhorse's own mouth: stayathomeserver.com - "It's too important not to share." (Say, English teachers, isn't that subtly different from "It's too important to not share"?)

Anyway, look in the lower right corner of that site for the children's book. It is utterly hilarious, at least for computer geeks. It would probably also be useful for some adults to read. "A server is a funny-looking box. It makes friends with computers." In this case, the home server makes friends with all the computers in the house.

Besides being pretty funny, the site raises awareness of home servers. Which may not be very useful if you have only one computer and use it only to surf the web, but for people like me... If I had known that home servers existed, I would probably have bought one. Particularly the part about being able to log on the home server from the Internet. This means I could play my CDs (which I have ripped to the hard disk) from work as if I were at home. I currently use Winamp Remote for that. It is a great idea, but there is a loss of quality and it clashes with my favorite antivirus program. I am leery of letting my home computer be without antivirus just so I can listen to my favorite music from work. Add the daily backup, and making a mirror of my old computers before they die, and it looks very attractive indeed.

Hewlett-Packard is supposed to roll out a dedicated home server this spring, and I intend to look at it once I have replaced the tooth that is loose now. Unless some other expense comes up. It is not an emergency. But it sounds like a good friend to have for all my computers. ^^