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PairNIC, operated by Pair Networks. From their web site: "Launched in January 1996 and profitable since its second month of operation...". I have hosted with them for many years and their reliability is unbeatable. If you are a US-based business you can't escape US jurisdiction anyway and probably won't mind paying a couple of dollars more.

I've been using Pairnic for all of my domain names, no complaints, and the prices seem reasonable. I use them to host my website, too. At one point I switched to someone else (phpwebhosting.com, I don't know if they're still around) and complaints from my site's users about slow/unresponsive pages went from zero to daily, at least. I switched back to pair.com and those complaints dropped back to zero.

Gandi.net. French open source geeks. They've been in the registrar business for about as long as you've been on Slashdot. Many consider it an advantage for their registrar to be outside US jurisdiction. Their terms of use and conduct in the face of legal challenges have received thumbs-up from privacy activists and lawyers.

PairNIC, operated by Pair Networks. From their web site: "Launched in January 1996 and profitable since its second month of operation...". I have hosted with them for many years and their reliability is unbeatable. If you are a US-based business you can't escape US jurisdiction anyway and probably won't mind paying a couple of dollars more.

There's no reason to ever take a game off the market.

I can think of three.

First, the upstream licensor of the game may offer only a time-limited license. The DVD releases of Daria and WKRP in Cincinnati were delayed for a long time because they had to figure out how to replace all the music that was licensed only for the original broadcast, not for home videos to be produced later. There's a reason Nintendo couldn't just start selling GoldenEye 007 on Virtual Console on day 1 of the Wii Shop Channel: it'd need a new contract with EON. And by the time that was negotiated, they ended up doing an enhanced remake instead. Likewise, Tetris DS was discontinued two years after release because The Tetris Company didn't want to flood the market with Tetris products.

That ties into the second reason: cannibalization. If you have too many of your own older products on the market, they compete with your newer products. If you just released Mario Party 7, would you want Mario Party 4, Mario Party 5, and Mario Party 6 to be on shelves? Worse, studies such as one done with clock widgets in GNOME show that where there are too many choices, a lot of people choose "none of the above" and walk out with nothing.

Third, I'd be interested to see how video games are substantially different from movies and TV series in this respect. The film Song of the South (1946) was briefly available on LaserDisc in some markets. It has not since been rereleased on DVD or Blu-ray anywhere, allegedly because of a change in prevailing moral values among viewers.

Arguing that PC games give players too many configuration options (even if they choose to use them) is ridiculous.

The problem is that players have to use them. In general, PC game controllers present their face buttons in an unpredictable order. So unless your controller happens to bean Xbox 360 game controller and the game you are playing happens to use "XInput" (specific support for Xbox 360 controllers under Windows), you have to go through at least some sort of configuration form before the computer knows which button to use for jump, attack, switch weapon, and pause.

Press the following buttons
in order:
[Up], Down, Left, Right,
Jump, Attack, Change Tool,
Pause

??? What commercial game have you played from the last 10 years that required that kind of configuration? The standard keybindings are very well known now. WASD+mouse to move about, [space] (usually) to jump, numeric keys to change weapons, etc. There will always be defaults. Just like most games now will automatically choose the graphic settings during the first launch. Of course these can all be overridden if desired, just like consoles allow the player to change the key bindings (as I recall). Of course there's little point in allow graphics options on a console - it's pretty much doing what it can.

Since when is choice a bad thing?

Since researchers discovered that people freeze up when they see too many choices. From this page:

Preferences can confuse many users. Take the famous too many clocks example. A significant number of test subjects were so surprised to have 5 choices of clock they couldn't figure out how to add a clock to their panel. This cost of preferences is invariably underestimated by us technical types.

This is a completely different use case. This is someone's first exposure to an unfamiliar UI. I don't "freeze up" every time I launch a game because there are graphic options somewhere under a settings menu. The same way I don't "freeze up" when I open my wardrobe and choose a shirt and tie. your type of thinking lead Apple to the 1-button mouse.

For FPS' - let's face it, the vast majority of console games

For this to be true, more than 50 percent of console titles this generation would have to be first-person shooters. I haven't seen evidence that this is anything but an exaggeration.

Consoles are a bad deal all around

Even when there are plenty of multiplayer console games that work with one copy per household, as opposed to the tendency of one copy per player on a PC?

Arguing that PC games give players too many configuration options (even if they choose to use them) is ridiculous.

The problem is that players have to use them. In general, PC game controllers present their face buttons in an unpredictable order. So unless your controller happens to bean Xbox 360 game controller and the game you are playing happens to use "XInput" (specific support for Xbox 360 controllers under Windows), you have to go through at least some sort of configuration form before the computer knows which button to use for jump, attack, switch weapon, and pause.

Press the following buttons
in order:
[Up], Down, Left, Right,
Jump, Attack, Change Tool,
Pause

Since when it choice a bad thing?

Since researchers discovered that people freeze up when they see too many choices. From this page:

Preferences can confuse many users. Take the famous too many clocks example. A significant number of test subjects were so surprised to have 5 choices of clock they couldn't figure out how to add a clock to their panel. This cost of preferences is invariably underestimated by us technical types.

Try Pair.com in Pittsburg, PA. I've been with them for over 16 years now and I've been very happy with their service and support.

Totally agree, once you get into this type of scale, you want to buy your own servers and colo them.

For a random example (not an endorsement, I've never used them before), Pair has 10U of space with 5 mbit bandwidth for only $400/month. Throw in a 2U server (~$3,000) with 12x 2T 7200 RPM drives (12x ~$150) in RAID 6 for 20T of usable space. Double the drive cost if you want "enterprise" drives. Shop around and I'm sure you can get better deals, these are just ballpark figures. I have no idea what kind of IOPS you need out of your storage, but it's easy (and much cheaper) to adjust your hardware to suit your needs when you own it.

The only situation where I wouldn't recommend managing your own servers is if you simply don't have the relevant domain knowledge AND you have the money to waste on managed hosting (ie, time is more valuable than money).

I've been using Pair Networks for about 15 years. They have the tools and space you need, and you can exactly mirror your present directory structure. It's either shared hosting (some 'dangerous' tools are limited) or your can lease a server. They have high reliability, near zero downtime, a software/hardware maintenance schedule (no surprises). It's FreeBSD Unix and they won't hold your hand with automated tools, so you're on your own.

Use a debian spam filter with zen.spamhous as the rbl and things will be nice and quiet.

We're not asking for this for the sake of it...because we're used to it on the PC

What you're used to isn't necessarily usable. Please read this article and scroll down to "The question of preferences", and read this article by Joel Spolsky.

I was saying, "we're not asking for this for the sake of it because we're used to it on the PC, we're asking for this because it's a good idea".

We're not asking for this for the sake of it...because we're used to it on the PC...it's because it's a good fucking idea for PC gamers.

Those articles are nice and all (Joel's ever so cute when he gets a bee in his bonnet), but as I've point out to ildon, it's possible for someone who doesn't care about tweaking settings to start the game and never even see an "Options" dialog. Moreover, they're looking at a very specific domain. Starting up Word, a user who "just wants to type a document" doesn't need to see a whole raft of options. However, a gamer, playing a game that runs sluggishly and wants to dial down anti-aliasing/model quality etc. is going to be extremely frustrated if he can't do that. I don't want to be able to have infinite control over my games, but I can handle something a little more involved than "Low, Medium, High".

Windows is fairly easy to use. Should Microsoft remove the registry and prevent anyone from changing any settings? Should they remove the ability to change the screen resolution? Window transparency?

It can be hidden in an "advanced options" menu, completely obliterating any complaints about a bad or confusing UI.

By "Advanced", do you mean something like "about:config" of Firefox, or do you mean actually testing every combination? The former is confusing; the latter increases your test matrix by one or two orders of magnitude if you attempt to support all combinations of options.

I mean, as in HL2, the main menu has an "Options" menu item. You click on that and are presented with simple options. If you want to turn off anti-aliasing, you can click on "Advanced...". If you are happy with the default settings, you never have to see those options, but if you aren't, you can change them. I don't understand why that is hard to grok? "about:config" is confusing, however, you also almost never need to use it to change options. Most users can use Firefox and never even need to see the contents of the "Options" dialog, let alone "about:config".

As for the test matrix complaint, I hadn't given a moment's thought to "testing every combination" because: a) that's not my job; and b) almost every PC game I've ever played had graphics options that I could change, and not one of them has ever crashed because a particular level of anti-aliasing was incompatible with a particular model quality. Hell, I edited my Quake 3 config file to increase the angle of my field of vision and it didn't crash.

We're not asking for this for the sake of it...because we're used to it on the PC

What you're used to isn't necessarily usable. Please read this article and scroll down to "The question of preferences", and read this article by Joel Spolsky.

It can be hidden in an "advanced options" menu, completely obliterating any complaints about a bad or confusing UI.

By "Advanced", do you mean something like "about:config" of Firefox, or do you mean actually testing every combination? The former is confusing; the latter increases your test matrix by one or two orders of magnitude if you attempt to support all combinations of options.

He's also a Perl guru, and has the chutzpah to stop using capitals, even for official publications.

Reminds me of the intro to a talk once. "My name is Chromatic. You can call me Chromatic."

Also reminds me of Robby, the only academic one-name I've ever heard of.

-- coppit (whose nick is easily traceable to his real name)

My hosting provider is carbon neutral.

Obviously not everyone wants those features, which is why the should be options and not defaults, but i think enough people do that it _is_ worth making them options.

This is the path to preference overload.

Try out pair.com for basic stuff. If you're trying to do anything resembling real work, however (such as hosting commercial websites) you're going to want the physical hardware all to yourself and $10-15 simply isn't a reasonable price anymore. At that range ($75 and up) I'd recommend serverbeach.com but only if you know what you're doing.

As per part 3 of above, why not have the button locations configurable?

It is configurable. As for why this is not exposed with a checkbox, usability tests show that users quickly become lost in a bewildering array of checkboxes, and testing all combinations of exposed preferences quickly becomes intractable. See The Question of Preferences.

Plus how do we know the human ate the neanderthal meat? Maybe they chewed it and spat it out.
--
Slow Poke

I for one welcome our new human overlords.
--
Slow Poke

Maybe the Canadians were upset about the "How to say eh, eh" video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79T_Honhewc

--
Slow Poke

And is this really a fail for Ubuntu or is it a fail for Dell?
--
You failed to be fast

Hopefully EMI has not licensed the silence of a blank CD.
--
Do you have slow friends?

Also hopefully they are not counting virtual machines here.
--
Slow Poke

It's almost guaranteed that they are talking virtual servers as well as some bare metal. Rackspace is talking about the 50,000 web servers that *THEY* manage--i.e. managed services. This figure likely doesn't include the thousands of rented colo machines which their customers manage themselves. The latter was Rackspace's first business model, a pure colo. It wasn't until relatively recently that they started offering managed services. It may very very turn out that the 50,000 server figure is the entire sum total of physical servers on their network.

What is the benefit of this?
--
Do not click

Good idea.
--
Don't click on this

Also hopefully they are not counting virtual machines here.
--
Slow Poke

Also Slashdot's karma is the same idea. So basically it's a ripoff.
--
Slow Poke

Is it possible the pirates are actually your army of virtual salesmen?
--
Slow Poke

I am kinda glad they are doing this remotely. I'd be upset if an Amazon SWAT team broke into my house and physically disabled my Kindle.
--
Slow Poke

Um. I think I'll wait for version 3 of this vaccine.
--
Slow Poke

Yeah. And when you steal my car make sure you let me drive it once every other week. Thanks.
--
Slow Poke

So would the correct term for them be austronauts?
--
Slow Poke

How soon before these flies start dive bombing humans and laying their maggot eggs in human heads? Sounds like reality is about to turn into a bad X-Files episode.
--
Slow Poke

Maybe the Greeks are worried Google's van is a trojan horse.
--
Are you slow?

Lol the Greek government is comprised of pure 100% idiocy.

Great. Now I can crash Windows just by looking at it.
--
Feeling slow?

This is going to hurt its blue book value though.
--
Feeling slow today?

Maybe the Greeks are worried Google's van is a trojan horse.
--
Are you slow?

Or make the wifi users eat McDonalds food. That'll kill them off quickly, freeing up all those valuable seats.
--
Slow Poke

What if airport security accidentally invokes brainscan with the --format flag? Also, does this mean brains are open source now?
--
Slow Poke

We tuned our VLF 15-25khz xmitter by peaking glowing disconnected fluorescent tubes.

http://www.hawkins.pair.com/nss.shtml

How about getting a hosting provider that does backup? I've been using pair.com for my sites for several years. They have about daily or twice-daily recent snapshots on the same server (that you can access yourself if you need to), then on-site backup, then off-site backup. As far as I know they don't ship those to customers, but this doesn't look to me like a very big risk. I haven't had to use any of the backups, and I think they haven't had any (big) loss of data since they went online more than ten years ago, as far as I can infer from reading the user groups. Of course you are at the mercy of the provider should a disaster happen, but is this really that much risk if they manage it properly?

Shameless $0.2 plug: if you get an account at pair, sign up through this affiliate link :) http://promote.pair.com/direct.pl?vad1.com+63035

Threads are fine if you have clean abstractions around them. Sort of like gotos are fine when abstracted out as for/while/do/etc.

--
Feed Weed: Feed your web addiction

The scienos operate their own prison and slave labor camp system, where their elite Sea Org members who step out of line get sent to be rehabilitated by labor at the RPF camps: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rehabilitation_Project_Force . And though not all of their labor "rehab" projects keep them prisoner by lock and key, they often coerce their prisoners into staying by blackmail, using the massive files of confessions they accumulate via auditing sessions, and "freeloader's debt," where they get retroactively charged for all the auditing they received for free, which often amounts to tens of thousands of dollars worth.

In the 70's, they infiltrated the US government using over 5,000 of their agents: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_snow_white.
Although this effort was uncovered, leading to their secret take-over by elements within the IRS who operate the whole racket for profit behind the scenes (which many people don't know about) their infiltration of France was successful to this day.

Earthlink is a front company for the Church of Scientology. So is Helio, the cell phone company. Google "Scientology front companies" for a shocking list; they are constantly trying to spy on and infiltrate and subvert whatever they can with no regards for ethics but the advancement of their own power.

Neither AT&T, nor the NSA have anywhere near the capacity to handle even a fraction of internet traffic.

One decent sized webhost (who also hosts a lot of Open Source project mirrors) delivers approx. 3 TB of data a day:
http://www.pair.com/insider/june2007.html#stats

Multiply that many times over and you're looking at petabytes or even exabytes of data moved around each day.

I doubt they're storing even a fraction of the traffic they are watching, but probably analyzing traffic and storing anything that meets certain criteria. Which probably still ends up being many TB of data each day.

This is an interesting read. It explains a lot about the philosophy behind things. Sometimes it looks nicer on paper (screen?) then when you just need to get something done.

The video isn't dead:
http://www4.tomshardware.com/site/downloads/wirednextfest_crash.swf
http://tau32.pair.com/german/video/wirednextfest_crash.swf
http://tau25.pair.com/sysdoc/video/wirednextfest_crash.swf

The video isn't dead:
http://www4.tomshardware.com/site/downloads/wirednextfest_crash.swf
http://tau32.pair.com/german/video/wirednextfest_crash.swf
http://tau25.pair.com/sysdoc/video/wirednextfest_crash.swf

Well having been declared Troll so many times for pointing out the facts behind the basic electromagnetic nature of the universe ..... Finally a story starting to recognize the undeniable fact that the universe is electrical. With this reality firmly in mind here goes.... Hold on tight because you are about to read nothing troll and what will finally be undeniable as Stereo B and other observational platforms get the pictures.

Yes the universe is electrical. Worse yet it is even more far out than anybody could have believed. All bodies in the universe that spin begin to develop into bodies with an ecliptic charge carried on plasma so what I am describing will occur to some extend in every body in the universe. The basic structure to understand is a Faraday Generator or the Homopolar or Unipolar generator. The universe is not one of these but it begins the understanding. A Conductive Plate (Super Conductive is much better ---> Plasma!)that rotates in the presence of a fixed magnetic field will generate an electrical current spreading towards its periphery and towards its axis pole. In a Plasma the magnetic field rotates with the plate because of the Birkeland Currents and which generates the same current at the homopolar generator without the torque drag of the homopolar generator. This device is known as DePalma's N-Machine. Readers of this should note the Birkeland Current similarity to the polar lights and note the similarity to mid latitude storms and sun spots. These have all been observed on the Sun as well.

This says something that was absolutely necessary for the universe to have any energy. That is that the Universe is COP > 1. Bluntly it is over unity. It also explains the missing neutrinos and such in the Solar Atomic model. Simply stated the Sun is a standard planet with a mostly Iron/Nickel makeup with some rocky material. It is about 1,000 times more dense than the gravity estimates of its mass propose. This is because the discharge of this very large N-Machine form at the solar surface is as observed a Gravity shield causing the sun to appear much less dense. It also says the "Gas Giants" are not also. Observers should note that meteors, comets, and asteroids are all the same thing and bluntly they are welding spatter as the massive electrical currents discharge against the surface of the sun. Take a look for yourself.

This explains nearly everything in the universe including the impossibility of every having any energy to do anything it the Universe wasn't COP > 1. I know this is going to challenge the physics of a lot of people but the issue is rapidly going beyond any denials. There is nothing troll about this. The only thing troll here is if somebody wants to deny others the ability to see the truth.

On July 19, 1951, in the Tribune under the title "Rhodes' Wards Hawk Global Scheme In U.S.," subtitled "Peddle Propaganda for 'One World," by William Fulton, we quote:

        "New York, July l9 - Rhodes scholars, returning from schooling and indoctrination at Oxford university, England, are the principal hawkers of globalist propaganda in the United States. The American scholars obtain their education abroad through terms of the will left by the late Cecil Rhodes, British empire builder and South African despot. Rhodes aimed at the return of the United States to the British empire and a world federation dominated by Anglo-Saxons. He hoped his scholars would be instilled with 'political bias' toward these ends, according to his intimate friends.

        "Previous articles in this series have disclosed that many of the 1,185 living American Rhodes scholars have obtained key positions in the state department, the United Nations, the economic cooperation administration, the mutual defense assistance program, and other government agencies where they have worked toward fulfillment of the schemes of their imperial patron." End quote.

THE RHODES ~ MILNER ROUND TABLE (result of a quick search... Seems like a good piece, but I haven't read it all. ?)

For those unfortunate souls who would be relegated to dialup if it weren't for Comcast, I suggest that you do not rely on Comcast's email services.

Yep! It's best to treat email service and your ISP as two different entities. It makes it easy to drop your ISP if you need to. This could mean using any number of the free or inexpensive email services available or simply registering your own domain with a company like pair.com and having even more control over your email service.

This is hardley a new idea. I went to a talk in Oakland, California a few years back by some guy who claimed to have communicated with aliens. He described something similar for how UFO's are powered. Also, the idea of the N-Machine has been around for a while, as have numerous rumours of the oil companies supressing such technology. And who can forget little Lisa Simpson. (Homer: "Lisa, in this house, we follow the rules of thermodynamics!")

I think this claim should be given a serious look. It seems incredible, but such a technology would be so revolutionary that it's worth it anyway. Of course, assuming that the conservation of energy still applies to the devices that USE this energy, by generating all that free energy, won't we be contributing to global warming in a way far beyond just trapping solar radiation?