I know that people jest about China, but oftentimes they make exactly what the ODM specs out. If they spec cheap crap, they get cheap stuff. If they spec quality, top tier parts, the ship from China drops off tier 1 motors.
Champion generators comes to mind. Yes, their manufacturing is in a factory in a coastal province, but their products tend to be as good as they come, and their service is top notch. They spec decent stuff, the factory returns decent stuff.
I'd keep the 386 around for historic reasons, but compared to the energy use of a small "biscuit" PC with a VIA or low power x86 CPU, 8-16 GB of RAM [1], and a SSD, the 386 is a power hog.
Even a regular PC with an instance of VMWare Workstation or VirtualBox would be better because it would use a lot less power.
I've fallen into that trap myself. However, there is a point where old hardware is so energy ineffecient compared to a modern machine and an emulator or VM product, that updating becomes a must eventually.
[1]: You want a good amount of RAM so you can either have everything cached, or do a RAMdisk mirror. This way, as little as possible goes to disk, which is important for a router since you want as little latency as possible.
I have my upgrade order from a 4 for one simple reason -- a higher storage capacity. iCloud Match is nice, but I end up out in areas where there is EDGE coverage or no coverage, so having music on the device itself is always useful.
Plus, there are some low-level security features which can't hurt. The iPhone 4S and newer use a better salting technique preventing the passcode hash from being copied off [1] (although a four digit PIN copied off will be cracked quickly no matter what [2].)
[2]: If you set a password (not a PIN) and use all numbers, when the iPhone asks for the code, it will pull up a numeric keypad, not the complete keyboard. Yes, it might lower security as an attacker knows the PIN is only numbers, but it is a lot easier to enter in the code that way.
There will be... to a point. There is a point where the devices will end up with market saturation. PCs got to that point a number of years ago.
The reason why we have seen such a spike in mobile devices is because of convergence. Until smartphones became commonplace, people would have a camera, MP3 player, pager, Blackberry for messages, cell phone, PDA, and GPS unit. Since an average smartphone does more than all these things combined [1], it ends up being a device that appeals for an extremely wide range of users even with the concerns about privacy.
However, there will be a point where smartphones hit diminishing returns where the device made last year doesn't do that much less than the latest and greatest, similar to how a PC on the shelf at a big box store now has almost nothing better than a PC bought 2-3 years ago, other than a faster GPU, faster CPU, and perhaps a tad more RAM. The biggest shift recently was the move from conventional hard disks to SSDs.
The PC market is still viable. It just isn't expanding as other markets are. There are also untapped markets out there. For example, the server market [2].
10-20 years from now, PCs will still be around. Unless there is some new brainwave interface, the best way to enter in data or type is still a keyboard. Yes, one *can* write a term paper on a touch screen, but it is a lot easier for the hands to use a better device suited for that task with a monitor that has plenty of real estate to compare editions and other items.
[1]: Although it may not be as good as a dedicated device. I wouldn't expect to do pro photos with a smartphone's camera, but it is useful to have nonetheless.
[2]: The home server market is definitely untapped. I can see a niche for a mini SAN where all the machines can use FCoE to boot from (with antivirus utilities able to scan the virtual disks which goes a long way to find rootkits), deduplication, centralized backups, streaming game video similar to OnLive. That way, only the server needs the high end GPUs, and everything else on that LAN segment can use streaming video from that.
We all know certs versus competency. However, the people who are hiring and firing really do not see how well one does in the job. At best, they might only be brought in the picture if there is a reprimand.
To the PHBs and the HR department, certs are everything. The guy who has little to no knowledge of the ramifications of their decisions, but has the pieces of paper will always get the position over someone who has the skills, but no "proof".
Of course, the exception is networking -- a place hiring someone they know can take precedence over any amount of certs.
Agreed, one can scrape data with OWA, or even plain old POP/SMTP/IMAP which Exchange has available with just a kick-start of a couple services.
However, this is definitely a hammer in their toolbox, especially if they can convince upper management that the new AS replacement is a lot more secure to the point of locking out all other protocols. If MS could convince a regulatory board that this is the case, it would be a major coup.
Locking this protocol wouldn't be just limited to patents. It also can be tacked in the EULA as well that the protocol is not to be dissassembled or used on any device "not authorized". In the US, that would put things in their favor. Of course, add a tad of DRM (perhaps a way of copying encoded documents), and the DMCA steps in. Getting around that would be as hard as demanding in court that Sony open up PSN to any and all devices.
The EU is a different beast, and IMHO, is the only legal entity in the world that MS has to fear. However, if MS left AS around as an installable option, they could say that they are not closing any protocols but just providing a "secure" option... even though there would be heavy pressure from MS to the enterprise to make that AS successor the only protocol devices can interact with.
Disclaimer: I'm being a devil's advocate, and I hope I'm absolutely wrong about this.
MS has one advantage they can use with this device, and that is that they control both the horizontal and the vertical in the enterprise. In typical/. form:
1: Create an ActiveSync successor protocol. One that is heavily patented, perhaps undocumented. 2: Sell the AS successor as a lot more secure than just TLS/SSL to get it firmly rooted in the enterprise. Show how it is more secure than BIS/BES as well. 3: Leverage the new AS successor in next revs of the OS making AS depreciated, or even yank it out together such as what was done with hierarchial storage management or IEE1394 networking. 4: Allow either only themselves, or them and Apple access to the protocol. 5: ????? 6: Profit. Nobody else would be able to use that protocol by law, so only devices either running a MS operating system, or devices authorized to use that protocol would be allowed to run.
The result of this is the ability to completely lock competition out of the enterprise. In the past, it might be considered monopolistic practices, but these are different times, and a serious case would never happen. The end result likely would be MS and Apple being the only players in the enterprise if this is done.
I am all for nuclear power. However, there is one thing I am leery about:
There is zero responsibility that can be assigned the builder of plants if something goes wrong in the US. A contractor could make a reactor head out of pot metal, cut corners many ways, and end up with a non-functioning, dangerous construction. The owners of the contracting business will be able to walk away with the cash from the contract without worry, leaving it up to the US taxpayers to deal with another Superfund site. In fact, the company could be owned offshore so there is zero recourse, criminal or civil to completely ignoring any regulations.
China is having a nuclear renassiance right now. They ensure that the contractors are doing the job right or heads will roll, literally.
Because of that, combined with a permanent ban on any new plant construction, large installations likely will not happen unless there is a major sea change in US politics.
The main hope for the US is with the smaller, portable plants/reactors that can be mass produced, then dropped into place. A number of small reactors in the megawatt range is probably the wave of the future as opposed to the large 2-4 GW plants that were on the books in the 1970s.
Some institutions are extremely good at keeping their flies zipped up. Others have fallen into the "security has no ROI" trap that seems to be the PHB mating call.
In the past, banks had a reputation to uphold, so a security breach would be extremely damaging with accountholders moving elsewhere. These days, because it is so hard to move to another provider, coupled with the bar lowered so low about perceived security, a security breach may not be something a bank cares about unless it is a regulator they would find hard-pressed to fight in court due to bad PR.
Ford is similar to the Concours -- to add a new key, you need two existing keys to the system.
Of course, if one loses a key, one can get a programmer for a Ford. However what the vehicle does to slow down a thief who has two cut keys is force a 10 minute wait cycle until security functions are accessible. Then keys can be added and removed.
The wait time isn't perfect -- someone's car that is tucked away somewhere remote can be accessed, but compared to having to replace the computer [1], it is a decent compromise.
There has to be a balance somewhere between "crap, lost all keys, time to replace ECM/TCM/audio system/etc." versus "plug device in, hotwire vehicle, drive off."
[1]: Mercedes systems from what I've seen are pretty secure, but if has to delete more then eight keys over the vehicle's lifetime, a good chunk of the car computer will need replaced.
There is that, or use security by obscurity. For example, on Ford PATS systems, one can put a switch in on the circuit of the ignition antenna which reads the key's RFID chip.
Flip the switch, and even if a thief was able to clone a 40 (S) or 80 bit (SA) PATS key, they will still be stuck scratching their head as the ignition still wouldn't start.
Of course, this doesn't mean that the thief will not resort to vandalism, but it will mean the vehicle most likely will remain in the same spot unless towed.
I wish they could add secure boot to the list that requires a mechanism to disable, such as locked bootloaders. This could be done similar to how the Nexus did the fastboot oem unlock, or similar to the mechanism of entering the IMEI, clicking yes to a series of dire warnings, and then getting a code to type in to unlock the bootloader permanently.
Maybe it is pie in the sky, but it would be nice to have the ability to truly use a device one purchased as their own.
I wouldn't bother with Spotify. I don't want my musicial tastes, horrid as they might be, linked to Facebook and its advertisers.
Instead, I'm very happy with Rdio. It not just streams, but downloads (encrypted) tracks. Rdio also seems to have a better band selection than Spotify.
I don't see on a modern laptop why UPEK would even be installed in the first place. If a laptop has a fingerprint scanner, Windows 7 or even Vista will find it and have a native process in place to enroll fingerprints and attach that as a credential to logging in.
I don't know how secure W7 stores that info, but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be something trivial to decode. Add a TPM chip and BitLocker [1] to the mix, and the fingerprint database is definitely well protected against intrusion.
[1]: If you are leery like me, you use a TPM + PIN + a nonce on a USB flash drive. This way, if the laptop is off or hibernated and it gets stolen, if the USB drive is still in the pocket, then there is assurance that the laptop's OS is well locked down. Even then, I like working completely from remote via GoToMyPC, or some other protocol so the laptop essentially is a glorified terminal. That way, if something does happen and the laptop is happily running and unattended, the damage is still minimal. If I have to store stuff locally, I use a TrueCrypt volume with keyfiles stored on a hardware-secured USB flash drive [2].
[2]: Only one I've really seen that is well engineered are the old IronKeys, now made by Imation. The advantage of these is brute force resistance. 10 wrong password guesses, the key either fries itself or erases itself depending on type.
I will go out on a limb, risk my geek card and propose another alternative:
Windows Server 2012 has a deduplication feature which works atop of NTFS (not ReFS). Unlike "real" deduplication on the LVM level which you get with your EMC, the files are written to the filesystem fully "hydrated", and as time passes, a background task [1] sifts through the blocks, finds ones that are the same, then adds reparse points.
The reason I'm suggesting this is that if one already has a Windows file server, it might be good to slap on 2012 when it is available, configure deduplication on a dedicated storage volume, and let it do the dirty work on the block level for you.
Of course, ZFS is the most elegant solution, but it may not be the best in the application.
[1]: Fire up PowerShell and type in: Start-DedupJob E: â"Type Optimization if you want to do it in the foreground after setting it up, if you did a large copy and want to dedupe it all.
We had HTPCs which were meant to be part of the stack of stuff by the TV with the proper black box and small LED screen as an option from HP and Dell for a couple years. Not many people bought them so eventually both companies stopped producing them.
Maybe it is for the better because the best option might be just building one's own. It might be a good idea to buy a good HTPC case and quiet PSU, then use a pair of SSDs in a RAID 1 configuration.
The reason why consoles are looking pretty infirm (I don't want to use the phrase "dying") is for four reasons:
1: Not much in the way of "cool new" stuff. Another FPS, another year of Madden, another multiplayer game where you can have the joy of hearing a 12 year old attempt to out-curse a Marine gunnery sargent, etc. All requiring not just the cost of the game, but additional cost for "mandatory" DLC like weapons or armor.
2: The economy has changed. People don't have $500+ for a good console with the full accessories needed to play (such as a decent hard disk.) Even $200 for something stripped down to the bones is expensive. PCs have good graphics, and improve each year, so a low-end desktop or laptop will have better graphics than a console will given a couple years.
3: Barrier of entry. On a Mac, it costs a C-note a year, but I can get an application in the App Store. If the application uses kernel extensions, I can have a signed binary on a website. Similar with Windows. The barrier of entry on consoles is a lot tougher (for example, the story of the indy dev who found it too expensive to submit a bug fix update.)
4: DRM. People are getting tired of the shell game and the fact they are getting less and less value for the money spent. First, one bought a game, and accessing the entire content was a matter of opening the packaging. Then came paid for DLC, which was nice at first, then became a requirement in order to do content which should have been in the original game. Then came the license keys, making people who bought a used game have to pay almost the retail price again in order to play.
If the economy improves, consoles may pick up as a market segment, but people these days are more interested in buying groceries as opposed to the latest PS or Xbox iteration.
CPU isn't the single item with mainframes. Mainframes tend to have large I/O buses, and that is something that tends to be forgotten about when people talk about CPU power.
Mainframes are designed to do business tasks, be it CICS operations, DB2 transactions, or other integer based operations that require tons of data going in and tons of data going out at a time. This is why IBM has such a good caching design. Having the ability to get the numbers into and out of the CPUs is what mainframes are designed to do.
If someone expects top notch floating point operations, expect to be disappointed. MIPS and sheer bus bandwidth rule the roost when it comes to this section of computing.
Mainframes do a bunch of tasks extremely well. The problem is that there is a "cheapest at any cost" mentality in IT, which is why this type of technology seems to be outmoded.
If businesses looked at the TCO of a mainframe, oftentimes, they would be better off, especially because of the CPU power per square foot of server room space, which a mainframe excels at. This is also true to a lesser extent with the higher end Oracle SPARC and IBM POWER7 machines.
The one advantage of mainframes is that once set up and configured, they pretty much sit there and other than phoning home to the IBM guy if some hardware breaks, it essentially can be forgotten about. No reboots every two weeks, or other stuff required unless there is a major security issue, and those tend to be very rare.
Mainframes are also good if one wants to do reliability from the bottom of the stack up, so having to do custom code for fault tolerance is minimized.
I'd like both: Professional reviews from people who are experts, as well as people who may or may not know what the heck they are doing.
Here is the problem: You force better real-life identification on a site, a shill company still can get around it.
There is only one real way to get "honest" reviews, and that is to use the time-tested PGP concept of the web of trust:
Have a site that allows you to post a review. Friends will see the review, and depending on how much credibility they give you, it will either show up, show up with a caveat that the person may or may not be honest, or just not show up unless explicitly clicked. Said site would also have a checkbox so someone can be honest and write if they got anything back for the review. This doesn't mean the review is bad; it just means it was not completely independent.
The Ford SYNC system does this already. If the car is going more than 3 miles/hour, you can't do a lot of functions, including look through an address book unless you use the voice features.
The problem is two things: Bad drivers, and sue-happy people. If a wreck happens, the attorneys involved want to go after the people with the deep pockets, not the party at fault. So, this is why Ford and other makers have to put this brain-damaged crap in their vehicles, just so they can claim they did their due diligence in dealing with the idiots.
Even if a "good" security system works, it still leaves a broken window, a trashed door, or other damage done by a burglar. I had a vehicle protected with a kill switch rather than a car alarm because I didn't care for the siren noise. It got broken into several times and the steering column opened up. My vehicle was still there when I came back, but it cost a pretty penny to get the broken window fixed, a new ignition switch, etc.
A real security system needs both. Real security that slows down or stops attacks combined with the "oh shit", brown-stain-in-pants, intimidation factor.
It also depends on the criminal. The two barking GSDs in the window may deter a professional thief who makes his money on doing his stuff quietly, but the meth-head will just fire off a few rounds with his 9mm, and score something to take to a fence for another bottle of shake-and-bake.
Personally, I'd take the laser system. Combined with a real alarm and in-depth security like sturdy, locking hall and bedroom doors, it will keep a good number of potential burglars at bay.
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I know that people jest about China, but oftentimes they make exactly what the ODM specs out. If they spec cheap crap, they get cheap stuff. If they spec quality, top tier parts, the ship from China drops off tier 1 motors.
Champion generators comes to mind. Yes, their manufacturing is in a factory in a coastal province, but their products tend to be as good as they come, and their service is top notch. They spec decent stuff, the factory returns decent stuff.
I'd keep the 386 around for historic reasons, but compared to the energy use of a small "biscuit" PC with a VIA or low power x86 CPU, 8-16 GB of RAM [1], and a SSD, the 386 is a power hog.
Even a regular PC with an instance of VMWare Workstation or VirtualBox would be better because it would use a lot less power.
I've fallen into that trap myself. However, there is a point where old hardware is so energy ineffecient compared to a modern machine and an emulator or VM product, that updating becomes a must eventually.
[1]: You want a good amount of RAM so you can either have everything cached, or do a RAMdisk mirror. This way, as little as possible goes to disk, which is important for a router since you want as little latency as possible.
Plus, there are some low-level security features which can't hurt. The iPhone 4S and newer use a better salting technique preventing the passcode hash from being copied off [1] (although a four digit PIN copied off will be cracked quickly no matter what [2].)
[1]:http://www.informationweek.com/security/encryption/security-fail-apple-ios-password-manager/232602738 is the source for that.
[2]: If you set a password (not a PIN) and use all numbers, when the iPhone asks for the code, it will pull up a numeric keypad, not the complete keyboard. Yes, it might lower security as an attacker knows the PIN is only numbers, but it is a lot easier to enter in the code that way.
There will be... to a point. There is a point where the devices will end up with market saturation. PCs got to that point a number of years ago.
The reason why we have seen such a spike in mobile devices is because of convergence. Until smartphones became commonplace, people would have a camera, MP3 player, pager, Blackberry for messages, cell phone, PDA, and GPS unit. Since an average smartphone does more than all these things combined [1], it ends up being a device that appeals for an extremely wide range of users even with the concerns about privacy.
However, there will be a point where smartphones hit diminishing returns where the device made last year doesn't do that much less than the latest and greatest, similar to how a PC on the shelf at a big box store now has almost nothing better than a PC bought 2-3 years ago, other than a faster GPU, faster CPU, and perhaps a tad more RAM. The biggest shift recently was the move from conventional hard disks to SSDs.
The PC market is still viable. It just isn't expanding as other markets are. There are also untapped markets out there. For example, the server market [2].
10-20 years from now, PCs will still be around. Unless there is some new brainwave interface, the best way to enter in data or type is still a keyboard. Yes, one *can* write a term paper on a touch screen, but it is a lot easier for the hands to use a better device suited for that task with a monitor that has plenty of real estate to compare editions and other items.
[1]: Although it may not be as good as a dedicated device. I wouldn't expect to do pro photos with a smartphone's camera, but it is useful to have nonetheless.
[2]: The home server market is definitely untapped. I can see a niche for a mini SAN where all the machines can use FCoE to boot from (with antivirus utilities able to scan the virtual disks which goes a long way to find rootkits), deduplication, centralized backups, streaming game video similar to OnLive. That way, only the server needs the high end GPUs, and everything else on that LAN segment can use streaming video from that.
We all know certs versus competency. However, the people who are hiring and firing really do not see how well one does in the job. At best, they might only be brought in the picture if there is a reprimand.
To the PHBs and the HR department, certs are everything. The guy who has little to no knowledge of the ramifications of their decisions, but has the pieces of paper will always get the position over someone who has the skills, but no "proof".
Of course, the exception is networking -- a place hiring someone they know can take precedence over any amount of certs.
Agreed, one can scrape data with OWA, or even plain old POP/SMTP/IMAP which Exchange has available with just a kick-start of a couple services.
However, this is definitely a hammer in their toolbox, especially if they can convince upper management that the new AS replacement is a lot more secure to the point of locking out all other protocols. If MS could convince a regulatory board that this is the case, it would be a major coup.
Locking this protocol wouldn't be just limited to patents. It also can be tacked in the EULA as well that the protocol is not to be dissassembled or used on any device "not authorized". In the US, that would put things in their favor. Of course, add a tad of DRM (perhaps a way of copying encoded documents), and the DMCA steps in. Getting around that would be as hard as demanding in court that Sony open up PSN to any and all devices.
The EU is a different beast, and IMHO, is the only legal entity in the world that MS has to fear. However, if MS left AS around as an installable option, they could say that they are not closing any protocols but just providing a "secure" option... even though there would be heavy pressure from MS to the enterprise to make that AS successor the only protocol devices can interact with.
Disclaimer: I'm being a devil's advocate, and I hope I'm absolutely wrong about this.
MS has one advantage they can use with this device, and that is that they control both the horizontal and the vertical in the enterprise. In typical /. form:
1: Create an ActiveSync successor protocol. One that is heavily patented, perhaps undocumented.
2: Sell the AS successor as a lot more secure than just TLS/SSL to get it firmly rooted in the enterprise. Show how it is more secure than BIS/BES as well.
3: Leverage the new AS successor in next revs of the OS making AS depreciated, or even yank it out together such as what was done with hierarchial storage management or IEE1394 networking.
4: Allow either only themselves, or them and Apple access to the protocol.
5: ?????
6: Profit. Nobody else would be able to use that protocol by law, so only devices either running a MS operating system, or devices authorized to use that protocol would be allowed to run.
The result of this is the ability to completely lock competition out of the enterprise. In the past, it might be considered monopolistic practices, but these are different times, and a serious case would never happen. The end result likely would be MS and Apple being the only players in the enterprise if this is done.
I am all for nuclear power. However, there is one thing I am leery about:
There is zero responsibility that can be assigned the builder of plants if something goes wrong in the US. A contractor could make a reactor head out of pot metal, cut corners many ways, and end up with a non-functioning, dangerous construction. The owners of the contracting business will be able to walk away with the cash from the contract without worry, leaving it up to the US taxpayers to deal with another Superfund site. In fact, the company could be owned offshore so there is zero recourse, criminal or civil to completely ignoring any regulations.
China is having a nuclear renassiance right now. They ensure that the contractors are doing the job right or heads will roll, literally.
Because of that, combined with a permanent ban on any new plant construction, large installations likely will not happen unless there is a major sea change in US politics.
The main hope for the US is with the smaller, portable plants/reactors that can be mass produced, then dropped into place. A number of small reactors in the megawatt range is probably the wave of the future as opposed to the large 2-4 GW plants that were on the books in the 1970s.
Some institutions are extremely good at keeping their flies zipped up. Others have fallen into the "security has no ROI" trap that seems to be the PHB mating call.
In the past, banks had a reputation to uphold, so a security breach would be extremely damaging with accountholders moving elsewhere. These days, because it is so hard to move to another provider, coupled with the bar lowered so low about perceived security, a security breach may not be something a bank cares about unless it is a regulator they would find hard-pressed to fight in court due to bad PR.
Maybe add a cryptographic signing mechanism combined with a sanity check limiting the URL to a certain domain and tree structure?
That way, even if someone did manage to get the private key, the damage done would be limited.
Ford is similar to the Concours -- to add a new key, you need two existing keys to the system.
Of course, if one loses a key, one can get a programmer for a Ford. However what the vehicle does to slow down a thief who has two cut keys is force a 10 minute wait cycle until security functions are accessible. Then keys can be added and removed.
The wait time isn't perfect -- someone's car that is tucked away somewhere remote can be accessed, but compared to having to replace the computer [1], it is a decent compromise.
There has to be a balance somewhere between "crap, lost all keys, time to replace ECM/TCM/audio system/etc." versus "plug device in, hotwire vehicle, drive off."
[1]: Mercedes systems from what I've seen are pretty secure, but if has to delete more then eight keys over the vehicle's lifetime, a good chunk of the car computer will need replaced.
There is that, or use security by obscurity. For example, on Ford PATS systems, one can put a switch in on the circuit of the ignition antenna which reads the key's RFID chip.
Flip the switch, and even if a thief was able to clone a 40 (S) or 80 bit (SA) PATS key, they will still be stuck scratching their head as the ignition still wouldn't start.
Of course, this doesn't mean that the thief will not resort to vandalism, but it will mean the vehicle most likely will remain in the same spot unless towed.
I wish they could add secure boot to the list that requires a mechanism to disable, such as locked bootloaders. This could be done similar to how the Nexus did the fastboot oem unlock, or similar to the mechanism of entering the IMEI, clicking yes to a series of dire warnings, and then getting a code to type in to unlock the bootloader permanently.
Maybe it is pie in the sky, but it would be nice to have the ability to truly use a device one purchased as their own.
I wouldn't bother with Spotify. I don't want my musicial tastes, horrid as they might be, linked to Facebook and its advertisers.
Instead, I'm very happy with Rdio. It not just streams, but downloads (encrypted) tracks. Rdio also seems to have a better band selection than Spotify.
I don't see on a modern laptop why UPEK would even be installed in the first place. If a laptop has a fingerprint scanner, Windows 7 or even Vista will find it and have a native process in place to enroll fingerprints and attach that as a credential to logging in.
I don't know how secure W7 stores that info, but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be something trivial to decode. Add a TPM chip and BitLocker [1] to the mix, and the fingerprint database is definitely well protected against intrusion.
[1]: If you are leery like me, you use a TPM + PIN + a nonce on a USB flash drive. This way, if the laptop is off or hibernated and it gets stolen, if the USB drive is still in the pocket, then there is assurance that the laptop's OS is well locked down. Even then, I like working completely from remote via GoToMyPC, or some other protocol so the laptop essentially is a glorified terminal. That way, if something does happen and the laptop is happily running and unattended, the damage is still minimal. If I have to store stuff locally, I use a TrueCrypt volume with keyfiles stored on a hardware-secured USB flash drive [2].
[2]: Only one I've really seen that is well engineered are the old IronKeys, now made by Imation. The advantage of these is brute force resistance. 10 wrong password guesses, the key either fries itself or erases itself depending on type.
Ubisoft also has other DRM systems. I bought a game off of Steam once from them. The game had three activations even on top of Steam's reasonable DRM.
I upgraded my vid card. There went activation #2.
My onboard USB controller died, so rebuilt my desktop. There went activation #3.
I could see about a crack, but why bother.
Ubisoft got my money for a product once. Unless something changes drastically, that mistake won't be repeated.
I will go out on a limb, risk my geek card and propose another alternative:
Windows Server 2012 has a deduplication feature which works atop of NTFS (not ReFS). Unlike "real" deduplication on the LVM level which you get with your EMC, the files are written to the filesystem fully "hydrated", and as time passes, a background task [1] sifts through the blocks, finds ones that are the same, then adds reparse points.
The reason I'm suggesting this is that if one already has a Windows file server, it might be good to slap on 2012 when it is available, configure deduplication on a dedicated storage volume, and let it do the dirty work on the block level for you.
Of course, ZFS is the most elegant solution, but it may not be the best in the application.
[1]: Fire up PowerShell and type in:
Start-DedupJob E: â"Type Optimization
if you want to do it in the foreground after setting it up, if you did a large copy and want to dedupe it all.
This is the exact reason why IBM does not use any hashing when it comes to their deduplication algorithms.
We had HTPCs which were meant to be part of the stack of stuff by the TV with the proper black box and small LED screen as an option from HP and Dell for a couple years. Not many people bought them so eventually both companies stopped producing them.
Maybe it is for the better because the best option might be just building one's own. It might be a good idea to buy a good HTPC case and quiet PSU, then use a pair of SSDs in a RAID 1 configuration.
The reason why consoles are looking pretty infirm (I don't want to use the phrase "dying") is for four reasons:
1: Not much in the way of "cool new" stuff. Another FPS, another year of Madden, another multiplayer game where you can have the joy of hearing a 12 year old attempt to out-curse a Marine gunnery sargent, etc. All requiring not just the cost of the game, but additional cost for "mandatory" DLC like weapons or armor.
2: The economy has changed. People don't have $500+ for a good console with the full accessories needed to play (such as a decent hard disk.) Even $200 for something stripped down to the bones is expensive. PCs have good graphics, and improve each year, so a low-end desktop or laptop will have better graphics than a console will given a couple years.
3: Barrier of entry. On a Mac, it costs a C-note a year, but I can get an application in the App Store. If the application uses kernel extensions, I can have a signed binary on a website. Similar with Windows. The barrier of entry on consoles is a lot tougher (for example, the story of the indy dev who found it too expensive to submit a bug fix update.)
4: DRM. People are getting tired of the shell game and the fact they are getting less and less value for the money spent. First, one bought a game, and accessing the entire content was a matter of opening the packaging. Then came paid for DLC, which was nice at first, then became a requirement in order to do content which should have been in the original game. Then came the license keys, making people who bought a used game have to pay almost the retail price again in order to play.
If the economy improves, consoles may pick up as a market segment, but people these days are more interested in buying groceries as opposed to the latest PS or Xbox iteration.
CPU isn't the single item with mainframes. Mainframes tend to have large I/O buses, and that is something that tends to be forgotten about when people talk about CPU power.
Mainframes are designed to do business tasks, be it CICS operations, DB2 transactions, or other integer based operations that require tons of data going in and tons of data going out at a time. This is why IBM has such a good caching design. Having the ability to get the numbers into and out of the CPUs is what mainframes are designed to do.
If someone expects top notch floating point operations, expect to be disappointed. MIPS and sheer bus bandwidth rule the roost when it comes to this section of computing.
Mainframes do a bunch of tasks extremely well. The problem is that there is a "cheapest at any cost" mentality in IT, which is why this type of technology seems to be outmoded.
If businesses looked at the TCO of a mainframe, oftentimes, they would be better off, especially because of the CPU power per square foot of server room space, which a mainframe excels at. This is also true to a lesser extent with the higher end Oracle SPARC and IBM POWER7 machines.
The one advantage of mainframes is that once set up and configured, they pretty much sit there and other than phoning home to the IBM guy if some hardware breaks, it essentially can be forgotten about. No reboots every two weeks, or other stuff required unless there is a major security issue, and those tend to be very rare.
Mainframes are also good if one wants to do reliability from the bottom of the stack up, so having to do custom code for fault tolerance is minimized.
I'd like both: Professional reviews from people who are experts, as well as people who may or may not know what the heck they are doing.
Here is the problem: You force better real-life identification on a site, a shill company still can get around it.
There is only one real way to get "honest" reviews, and that is to use the time-tested PGP concept of the web of trust:
Have a site that allows you to post a review. Friends will see the review, and depending on how much credibility they give you, it will either show up, show up with a caveat that the person may or may not be honest, or just not show up unless explicitly clicked. Said site would also have a checkbox so someone can be honest and write if they got anything back for the review. This doesn't mean the review is bad; it just means it was not completely independent.
The Ford SYNC system does this already. If the car is going more than 3 miles/hour, you can't do a lot of functions, including look through an address book unless you use the voice features.
The problem is two things: Bad drivers, and sue-happy people. If a wreck happens, the attorneys involved want to go after the people with the deep pockets, not the party at fault. So, this is why Ford and other makers have to put this brain-damaged crap in their vehicles, just so they can claim they did their due diligence in dealing with the idiots.
Even if a "good" security system works, it still leaves a broken window, a trashed door, or other damage done by a burglar. I had a vehicle protected with a kill switch rather than a car alarm because I didn't care for the siren noise. It got broken into several times and the steering column opened up. My vehicle was still there when I came back, but it cost a pretty penny to get the broken window fixed, a new ignition switch, etc.
A real security system needs both. Real security that slows down or stops attacks combined with the "oh shit", brown-stain-in-pants, intimidation factor.
It also depends on the criminal. The two barking GSDs in the window may deter a professional thief who makes his money on doing his stuff quietly, but the meth-head will just fire off a few rounds with his 9mm, and score something to take to a fence for another bottle of shake-and-bake.
Personally, I'd take the laser system. Combined with a real alarm and in-depth security like sturdy, locking hall and bedroom doors, it will keep a good number of potential burglars at bay.