My point was: Both of those products are overpriced. The Apple one is more overpriced than the Promise one but the Promise one is overpriced as well.
I attempted to illustrate this by showing how a similar device with more powerful, more capable hardware could be built much cheeper. I admit, it's not a superset or a replacement for the other devices but I believe it demonstrates that the $4,300 embeded device that only provides block device RAID functionality is overpriced when a full capabilites server can be built for less.
Comparable to wind energy. Not zero. Comparable to wind energy.
Your point is that emissions from the production of nuclear power are comparable to that of wind power generation, aka, next to nothing. Unlike wind, however, nuclear power is economical and appropriate as a large scale general purpose power source.
Oh the irony, when you made such an immense cockup only a few seconds ago. Get it through your tiny little brain; nuclear power derived from uranium is not the solution.
Nuclear power has been ignored for decades now because of fears about it's safety while instead, we burn coal that has poisoned our landscape with mercury and other toxins and dumped ridiculous quantities of greenhouse gases into our atmosphere. I absolutely agree with the original poster's conclusion that "environmentalists" have done more harm to the environment than good because of their sustained objections to nuclear power. There are no realistic alternatives to nuclear power for economical general purpose, reliable power generation.
I put "environmentalists" in quotes because I've found that most people who use that label are much more interested in the quality of "their" environment than they are about the environment in general. The difference most starkly shows itself in opposition to nuclear power which is wildly good for the environment in comparison to the alternatives but which people deeply fear because of the implications for their safety.
We could continue to ignore the potential for nuclear power to help reduce our environmental damage. I'm sure mother earth will be able to deal with a few more decades of coal power plants belching toxins and greenhouse gasses all over our land. The question is, do we care enough about our environment to accept the risks to us of having nuclear power generation or are we too selfish to make the right choice.
Assuming you are willing to make the pre-existing G5 your file server, then yes, the "plus the cost of whatever server you hook it up to" goes to nothing. That's why I separated that cost out. Unless there's something wrong with my $13,000 number my facts seem pretty well checked. Still... not a good deal.
For a more or less direct comparison I'd suggest looking at the promise VTrak M500f. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82 E16811777006 Add 14 500GB drives at $360 each and your total comes to under $10,000. I consider chaging $3000 too much to qualify for my vague "hardly a good value" proclamation above. In my opinion, the VTrak M500f in and of itself is wildy overpriced and creates an array with far too high a ratio of drive cost to overhead cost (0.75) and the Apple product's ratio is even worse than that (around 0.63) both not counting server cost and both using very expensive drives (which makes the ratio higher than it should be).
A good deal for an array in my book is one with a ratio over 1, including server cost, using the cheepest cost/gig high quality drives available. Tough but doable. Here's a rough first stab at a design with only about $1,800 of overhead cost to bring 15 drives online: http://secure.newegg.com/NewVersion/WishList/WishS hareShow.asp?ID=1771473 Its not comperable to either of the above products for ease of setup but far superior for cost and level of functionality. Using $360 500GB drives like the above configurations this comes out with a drive/overhead cost ratio of 3.0 which shows just how much too much they are charging for the above products.
No.. but it is many many times less likely to fail in comparison to storing a single copy on DVDs which is what it is being compared to here.
In general though, the need to do backups is greatly reduced with RAID and in some cases, a single copy on a RAID array is "good enough" which is to say it eliminates the need to create a separate backup copy. To claim otherwise is to not fully understand data backup.
"you get what you pay for" - the age old cry of someone asking you to pay too much for something.
One unit can provide 7TB of storage. Hmm.. $13,000 plus the cost of whatever server you hook it up to. Hardly a good value. Maybe they'll make up for obviously overpriced hardware with important yet intangible benefits.:)
The poster asks different questions than the articles linked raise and they are valid questions.
The objectives of large scale redundant and able to be put in a closet are needs unmet by todays storage designs and are likely to be as common tomorrow as wireless ethernet is today.
2GB/session isn't really enough information to design a storage solution but I'll dump out some generic big, reliable and cheep storage suggestions.
For large scale reliable storage I dislike both optical and tape. They both quickly become more work to manage than it's worth and have serious reliability issues. Hard drive based is the way to go and since hard drives do fail and that is a bad thing, it's best to use RAID. It's especially a good idea since RAID is getting easier, since hard drives are getting cheaper per unit and since SerialATA is making it easy to hook them up right.
Heres a basic design that I'm actually working on for a home server for myself: http://secure.newegg.com/NewVersion/WishList/WishS hareShow.asp?ID=1764600 It's a 3U rack mountable 2TB storage server. Put a Linux distro on it with some small RAID1 boot partitions and a software RAID5 storage partition, throw samba and some email-home config to notify of drive failures and you've got a decent place to store up to 1000 of those 2GB sessions. Zip up the old ones if needed for more space. If rack-mounting isn't desirable there are cheaper desktop cases that would probably be appropriate.
If this is overkill a 4 drive RAID5 array or even a 2 drive RAID1 array is much much easier to accomplish. Standard case, motherboard, power supply and drives with a Linux distro and you're done. Hardware RAID is also an option but since software RAID's high CPU usage wouldn't be an issue here I'd go that route.
I run my own IMAP server from my home server attached to a cable modem. The mail is stored on a RAID5 array and backed up nightly to a separate drive. I then run IMAP clients some saving a local copy, some not. I could setup a webmail server but personally I think a web browser is a horrible application for reading mail, an email client like Thunderbird is much better suited so I don't bother.
I then have all my e-mail delivered to this computer. It may sound like more work than it's worth but I have all my emails back to 1996 online all the time and nobody bugs me about being over-quota.
I think the problem is that Blizzard gives us such a strong illusion of ownership and control while maintaining WoW as an iron clad top down dictatorship. They rule WoW with an iron fist. There are no appeals, no checks, no balances, and we in the US aren't comfortable with this.
Imagine raising a puppy just to have the owner come along one day and kill it because you did something they didn't approve of. It doesn't matter what the agreement you signed earlier said, they'd be off to jail. There is no such check or balance on what Blizzard can do with the characters you have built.
WoW is very new and because there is basically no competition, there is no motivation for Blizzard to treat customers with respect. The online population has exploaded so fast that losing a loyal customer isn't something that worries them. Because of this, asking for help or special treatment is like asking the riot police for directions, not very useful.
Dictatorships have serious problems, the biggest of which is that people generally dislike them. This becomes an even more serious problem when your success depends on people wanting to participate enough to pay money. Imagine if Disney World were in a third world country where visitors were executed if they misbehaved. Business wouldn't be good. Blizzard will eventually have the same problem.
In time, when there is decent competition for your monthly fees, Blizzard won't be the tower of uncaring evil they are now. They'll think twice about spying on every process running on your computer, they'll hear you out when you have a complaint, they may even make a world with elected representatives for each faction on each server to address pressing issues. I can even imagine a time when having a company own your character is as unheard of as having a phone company own your phone number.
Giving horde pretty elves would totally destroy the balance in the game. As it is horde are overpowered as compared to aliance in no small part due to Shamen. The only thing the Aliance has going for it is that horde characters and lands are ugly and many people just don't like that. Give them nice pretty elves and all that changes. Unless they give us shamen, we in the aliance are screwed.
I think to properly balance, if they get Elves, we should get Tauren. Tauren are one of the most powerful races and from their back story they don't really belong with the horde. Since there are Tauren shamen, it stands to reason that the Aliance shoult get Tauren and with them, shamen. And on that day, I will create one and start power-leveling.
The idea to use a JVM for menus is even more stupid than the existing DVD menu technology. Please... people.. put content on the disks and let the player play it. This isn't rocket science, it's movies. I can just imagine..
"Sorry kids. We can't watch the movie. The menu crashes the DVD player. "
Give me the content and keep your grubby noisy garbage menus and "Can't skip this part" crap to yourselves or the next generation movie player I own will be a PC running P2P software because the features are better.
But on the net you should probably be using DNS anyway's, Any version of IP is not meant to be easy for YOU to read, they are made for COMPUTERS, the fact that IPV4 is a little more convenient for a human to remember is just coincidence.
You are assuming that humans never deal with IP addresses directly. This is obviously false.
IPv6 is a 128 bit address scheme. There is no need for that many bits. V4 is 32 bit. 48 would likely be plenty for the next 50 years. It would be 65,000 times as many as we have now. We're talking TRILLIONS. While more addresses is good bigger addresses is bad. IPv6 doesn't strike a proper balance between the two.
How does this make it easier to remember the address of my device that isn't in DNS for whatever reason? (and don't even try to claim those times are rare and therefor unimportant. They're quite common.) Yea.. it's just that 16 character router prefix + the device's 12 character Mac address + 4 characters of garbage the protocol throws into the Mac address..
That hardly seems easier than the 12 number V4 addresses I'm used to. So you no-longer need DHCP. You're forgetting that the layer of abstraction is providing something useful, in the case of DHCP it's efficient use of address space which adds up to simpler addresses.
This, in my opinion, is why IPv6 isn't more popular. They really screwed the pooch with the address space layout. They designed a scheme that scales up well and down horribly and the fact is that most networks are small and private and run by people who don't know they are running a network (home users). Also, IP's are used much more often than the V6 designers seem to have realized and should be much easier to type. They should, in many cases, be easier even than V4 addresses are.
They could have done it well. They could have made it so that the top bits are assigned by ISPs starting with the highest order bits first and expanding down from there and local bits are assigned lowest bits first and expanded as needed so in general most addresses would be short::short. A companies address range could be 2f:f0:2d:: (the equivalent of a Class C today that would normally only have 256 addresses but instead it would yield essentially infinite addresses. As addresses became tight they could limit themselves to 2f:f0:2d:1:: and then the 02-ff could be sold off. By only adding bits to the address when they are needed you guarantee the simplest possible address for the current size of the internet. Instead they are tying to add all the bits they will ever need at the beginning.
I will also add that it's a bad idea to have 128 bits in the address. That's insane. 64 is plenty for the lifespan of the protocol. I believe the current population of internet connected devices would probably fit easily in 36 bits. Adding 28 bits yields roughly 200 million times as many addresses. If every person on the planet had 1 million addresses we'd still be using less than one tenth of one percent of the address space. Instead of figuring out how to write a clean 64 bit address scheme they assumed that more address space is better and came up with a way to use it. It's bad design.
Generating local portions of the address from the Mac address is neat and clever but not really that good in practice because it adds bits tot he address unnecessarily. My guess is when a new scheme is finely widely adopted over V4 it won't be as wasteful and gigantic as V6's.
That's my gut feeling on V6 addressing. Can someone please explain to me why I'm wrong and why, in fact, this gigantic address space and these insanely long addresses are a good thing? Is it possible to do what I'm talking about with V6 where addresses aren't any more complicated than is necessary?
The perfect speakers
on
TCP/IP Speakers
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
additional ADCs and DACs reduce resolution
Who said anything about additional conversions. You can pull music directly off of CD in digital format and send it that way to speakers. One DAC, in the speaker, directly attached to the amp which is tuned exactly to the speakers and directly attached with no noise or tranmission loss. This setup by its very nature is the ultimate in audio quality. Sure analog heads who think that vinal sounds better than CD won't like it but they're all insane anyway. The loss and noise between amp and speakers is why people waste so much money on monster cables. This eliminates that completely.
I've long talked about the ethernet speaker with my friends as something I thought would eventually be huge. Now what we need is an interoperable ethernet speaker protocol, and a software sound card driver that will allow me to use them as my computer speakers directly.
Funny asside.. how long do you think it will be before monster starts selling Monster Ethernet cables and people start swearing they can hear the difference.
If I had to make one suggestion that would improve the quality of our legal system immensely, it would be to change two things (both of which lawyers would oppose, so not likely to happen): ....
I'd add to this a form of loser pais that increases the risk of bringing a suit you can't win and decreases the rist of fighting one you can. This would reduce the tendancy of companies to abuse the legal system as a way to bully and coerce people.
So if a child steals from a store that they go to without a parent, it should be OK because the minor can't afford to purchase the item?
Let's get this straight, copyright violation is not theft. They are legally different and they are obviously different on their face. When stealing from a store the store no-longer has the physical item they have spent money to be able to to sell.
The effect of copyright violation is that it possibly removes a potential customer. It's highly debatable as to how close to stealing that is but what is clear fact is that it is NOT the same thing.
Run IE and your machine will probalby get infected with tons of spyware which will cripple your machine if you do a lot of web browsing.
Run Mozilla and it probably won't.
That's been my experience so far.
Rating software's security as lower when they fix more bugs seems like it would motivate exactly the wrong behavior. Also, it's invalid on it's face. If IE has 1000 security flaws and fixes 10 and Mozilla has 50 and fixes 15 IE isn't more secure, before or after. There is no scientific measure of security but the bug fix count hardly seems worth looking at.
Anyone should be able to put any device on your network with all the authentication they can muster and not damage your network. This is security 101. Treat your users as hostile because sometimes, they are!
Let them use what they can but don't let them break anything that you couldn't fix. Not letting people use the tools you give them is a braindead solution to the problem. Granted, it may be a temporary necessity because your servers and services are next to impossible to secure any other way but long term, this is not the solution.
At work, it's not your computer and not your responsibility when something really bad happens.
And if I bring my own $300 Dell in and unplug the paper weight the corperate admin's won't let me use, that makes things better?
Like someone else pointed out, a company's job is to do something, not have secure computers. If your employees are checkout clerks, lock them down. If they are professionals, treat them as such or you just waste everyones time.
And every time you block a port, multiply the number of employees affected, 1%, and 2 hours to figure out how much company time you just wasted forcing people to work around your "security".
Slashdot Mirror
You missed the point entirely.
My point was: Both of those products are overpriced. The Apple one is more overpriced than the Promise one but the Promise one is overpriced as well.
I attempted to illustrate this by showing how a similar device with more powerful, more capable hardware could be built much cheeper. I admit, it's not a superset or a replacement for the other devices but I believe it demonstrates that the $4,300 embeded device that only provides block device RAID functionality is overpriced when a full capabilites server can be built for less.
Comparable to wind energy. Not zero. Comparable to wind energy.
Your point is that emissions from the production of nuclear power are comparable to that of wind power generation, aka, next to nothing. Unlike wind, however, nuclear power is economical and appropriate as a large scale general purpose power source.
Oh the irony, when you made such an immense cockup only a few seconds ago. Get it through your tiny little brain; nuclear power derived from uranium is not the solution.
Nuclear power has been ignored for decades now because of fears about it's safety while instead, we burn coal that has poisoned our landscape with mercury and other toxins and dumped ridiculous quantities of greenhouse gases into our atmosphere. I absolutely agree with the original poster's conclusion that "environmentalists" have done more harm to the environment than good because of their sustained objections to nuclear power. There are no realistic alternatives to nuclear power for economical general purpose, reliable power generation.
I put "environmentalists" in quotes because I've found that most people who use that label are much more interested in the quality of "their" environment than they are about the environment in general. The difference most starkly shows itself in opposition to nuclear power which is wildly good for the environment in comparison to the alternatives but which people deeply fear because of the implications for their safety.
We could continue to ignore the potential for nuclear power to help reduce our environmental damage. I'm sure mother earth will be able to deal with a few more decades of coal power plants belching toxins and greenhouse gasses all over our land. The question is, do we care enough about our environment to accept the risks to us of having nuclear power generation or are we too selfish to make the right choice.
Oops.. Good catch. Replace with2 E16814170091
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N8
An XServe RAID can hook directly to a G5 tower
2 E16811777006
S hareShow.asp?ID=1771473
Assuming you are willing to make the pre-existing G5 your file server, then yes, the "plus the cost of whatever server you hook it up to" goes to nothing. That's why I separated that cost out. Unless there's something wrong with my $13,000 number my facts seem pretty well checked. Still... not a good deal.
For a more or less direct comparison I'd suggest looking at the promise VTrak M500f.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N8
Add 14 500GB drives at $360 each and your total comes to under $10,000. I consider chaging $3000 too much to qualify for my vague "hardly a good value" proclamation above. In my opinion, the VTrak M500f in and of itself is wildy overpriced and creates an array with far too high a ratio of drive cost to overhead cost (0.75) and the Apple product's ratio is even worse than that (around 0.63) both not counting server cost and both using very expensive drives (which makes the ratio higher than it should be).
A good deal for an array in my book is one with a ratio over 1, including server cost, using the cheepest cost/gig high quality drives available. Tough but doable. Here's a rough first stab at a design with only about $1,800 of overhead cost to bring 15 drives online:
http://secure.newegg.com/NewVersion/WishList/Wish
Its not comperable to either of the above products for ease of setup but far superior for cost and level of functionality. Using $360 500GB drives like the above configurations this comes out with a drive/overhead cost ratio of 3.0 which shows just how much too much they are charging for the above products.
"RAID is not a backup solution."
No.. but it is many many times less likely to fail in comparison to storing a single copy on DVDs which is what it is being compared to here.
In general though, the need to do backups is greatly reduced with RAID and in some cases, a single copy on a RAID array is "good enough" which is to say it eliminates the need to create a separate backup copy. To claim otherwise is to not fully understand data backup.
Hard drives do fail while off. A single copy will yield data loss, it's just a matter of time.
"you get what you pay for" - the age old cry of someone asking you to pay too much for something.
:)
One unit can provide 7TB of storage.
Hmm.. $13,000 plus the cost of whatever server you hook it up to. Hardly a good value. Maybe they'll make up for obviously overpriced hardware with important yet intangible benefits.
Where did this insane concept of using water up come from? The stuff just goes right back in the ground we pumped it out of.
The poster asks different questions than the articles linked raise and they are valid questions.
:)
The objectives of large scale redundant and able to be put in a closet are needs unmet by todays storage designs and are likely to be as common tomorrow as wireless ethernet is today.
So.. basically.. snoo snoo off.
2GB/session isn't really enough information to design a storage solution but I'll dump out some generic big, reliable and cheep storage suggestions.
S hareShow.asp?ID=1764600
For large scale reliable storage I dislike both optical and tape. They both quickly become more work to manage than it's worth and have serious reliability issues. Hard drive based is the way to go and since hard drives do fail and that is a bad thing, it's best to use RAID. It's especially a good idea since RAID is getting easier, since hard drives are getting cheaper per unit and since SerialATA is making it easy to hook them up right.
Heres a basic design that I'm actually working on for a home server for myself:
http://secure.newegg.com/NewVersion/WishList/Wish
It's a 3U rack mountable 2TB storage server. Put a Linux distro on it with some small RAID1 boot partitions and a software RAID5 storage partition, throw samba and some email-home config to notify of drive failures and you've got a decent place to store up to 1000 of those 2GB sessions. Zip up the old ones if needed for more space. If rack-mounting isn't desirable there are cheaper desktop cases that would probably be appropriate.
If this is overkill a 4 drive RAID5 array or even a 2 drive RAID1 array is much much easier to accomplish. Standard case, motherboard, power supply and drives with a Linux distro and you're done. Hardware RAID is also an option but since software RAID's high CPU usage wouldn't be an issue here I'd go that route.
I run my own IMAP server from my home server attached to a cable modem. The mail is stored on a RAID5 array and backed up nightly to a separate drive. I then run IMAP clients some saving a local copy, some not. I could setup a webmail server but personally I think a web browser is a horrible application for reading mail, an email client like Thunderbird is much better suited so I don't bother.
I then have all my e-mail delivered to this computer. It may sound like more work than it's worth but I have all my emails back to 1996 online all the time and nobody bugs me about being over-quota.
I think everyone should have a server like this.
I think the problem is that Blizzard gives us such a strong illusion of ownership and control while maintaining WoW as an iron clad top down dictatorship. They rule WoW with an iron fist. There are no appeals, no checks, no balances, and we in the US aren't comfortable with this.
Imagine raising a puppy just to have the owner come along one day and kill it because you did something they didn't approve of. It doesn't matter what the agreement you signed earlier said, they'd be off to jail. There is no such check or balance on what Blizzard can do with the characters you have built.
WoW is very new and because there is basically no competition, there is no motivation for Blizzard to treat customers with respect. The online population has exploaded so fast that losing a loyal customer isn't something that worries them. Because of this, asking for help or special treatment is like asking the riot police for directions, not very useful.
Dictatorships have serious problems, the biggest of which is that people generally dislike them. This becomes an even more serious problem when your success depends on people wanting to participate enough to pay money. Imagine if Disney World were in a third world country where visitors were executed if they misbehaved. Business wouldn't be good. Blizzard will eventually have the same problem.
In time, when there is decent competition for your monthly fees, Blizzard won't be the tower of uncaring evil they are now. They'll think twice about spying on every process running on your computer, they'll hear you out when you have a complaint, they may even make a world with elected representatives for each faction on each server to address pressing issues. I can even imagine a time when having a company own your character is as unheard of as having a phone company own your phone number.
Giving horde pretty elves would totally destroy the balance in the game. As it is horde are overpowered as compared to aliance in no small part due to Shamen. The only thing the Aliance has going for it is that horde characters and lands are ugly and many people just don't like that. Give them nice pretty elves and all that changes. Unless they give us shamen, we in the aliance are screwed.
I think to properly balance, if they get Elves, we should get Tauren. Tauren are one of the most powerful races and from their back story they don't really belong with the horde. Since there are Tauren shamen, it stands to reason that the Aliance shoult get Tauren and with them, shamen. And on that day, I will create one and start power-leveling.
The idea to use a JVM for menus is even more stupid than the existing DVD menu technology. Please... people.. put content on the disks and let the player play it. This isn't rocket science, it's movies. I can just imagine..
"Sorry kids. We can't watch the movie. The menu crashes the DVD player. "
Give me the content and keep your grubby noisy garbage menus and "Can't skip this part" crap to yourselves or the next generation movie player I own will be a PC running P2P software because the features are better.
But on the net you should probably be using DNS anyway's, Any version of IP is not meant to be easy for YOU to read, they are made for COMPUTERS, the fact that IPV4 is a little more convenient for a human to remember is just coincidence.
You are assuming that humans never deal with IP addresses directly. This is obviously false.
IPv6 is a 128 bit address scheme. There is no need for that many bits. V4 is 32 bit. 48 would likely be plenty for the next 50 years. It would be 65,000 times as many as we have now. We're talking TRILLIONS. While more addresses is good bigger addresses is bad. IPv6 doesn't strike a proper balance between the two.
The assumption that all machine addresses will always be in DNS is obviously false. Bigger addresses are a bad thing.
How does this make it easier to remember the address of my device that isn't in DNS for whatever reason? (and don't even try to claim those times are rare and therefor unimportant. They're quite common.) Yea.. it's just that 16 character router prefix + the device's 12 character Mac address + 4 characters of garbage the protocol throws into the Mac address..
That hardly seems easier than the 12 number V4 addresses I'm used to. So you no-longer need DHCP. You're forgetting that the layer of abstraction is providing something useful, in the case of DHCP it's efficient use of address space which adds up to simpler addresses.
This, in my opinion, is why IPv6 isn't more popular. They really screwed the pooch with the address space layout. They designed a scheme that scales up well and down horribly and the fact is that most networks are small and private and run by people who don't know they are running a network (home users). Also, IP's are used much more often than the V6 designers seem to have realized and should be much easier to type. They should, in many cases, be easier even than V4 addresses are.
They could have done it well. They could have made it so that the top bits are assigned by ISPs starting with the highest order bits first and expanding down from there and local bits are assigned lowest bits first and expanded as needed so in general most addresses would be short::short. A companies address range could be 2f:f0:2d:: (the equivalent of a Class C today that would normally only have 256 addresses but instead it would yield essentially infinite addresses. As addresses became tight they could limit themselves to 2f:f0:2d:1:: and then the 02-ff could be sold off. By only adding bits to the address when they are needed you guarantee the simplest possible address for the current size of the internet. Instead they are tying to add all the bits they will ever need at the beginning.
I will also add that it's a bad idea to have 128 bits in the address. That's insane. 64 is plenty for the lifespan of the protocol. I believe the current population of internet connected devices would probably fit easily in 36 bits. Adding 28 bits yields roughly 200 million times as many addresses. If every person on the planet had 1 million addresses we'd still be using less than one tenth of one percent of the address space. Instead of figuring out how to write a clean 64 bit address scheme they assumed that more address space is better and came up with a way to use it. It's bad design.
Generating local portions of the address from the Mac address is neat and clever but not really that good in practice because it adds bits tot he address unnecessarily. My guess is when a new scheme is finely widely adopted over V4 it won't be as wasteful and gigantic as V6's.
That's my gut feeling on V6 addressing. Can someone please explain to me why I'm wrong and why, in fact, this gigantic address space and these insanely long addresses are a good thing? Is it possible to do what I'm talking about with V6 where addresses aren't any more complicated than is necessary?
additional ADCs and DACs reduce resolution
Who said anything about additional conversions. You can pull music directly off of CD in digital format and send it that way to speakers. One DAC, in the speaker, directly attached to the amp which is tuned exactly to the speakers and directly attached with no noise or tranmission loss. This setup by its very nature is the ultimate in audio quality. Sure analog heads who think that vinal sounds better than CD won't like it but they're all insane anyway. The loss and noise between amp and speakers is why people waste so much money on monster cables. This eliminates that completely.
I've long talked about the ethernet speaker with my friends as something I thought would eventually be huge. Now what we need is an interoperable ethernet speaker protocol, and a software sound card driver that will allow me to use them as my computer speakers directly.
Funny asside.. how long do you think it will be before monster starts selling Monster Ethernet cables and people start swearing they can hear the difference.
If I had to make one suggestion that would improve the quality of our legal system immensely, it would be to change two things (both of which lawyers would oppose, so not likely to happen):
....
I'd add to this a form of loser pais that increases the risk of bringing a suit you can't win and decreases the rist of fighting one you can. This would reduce the tendancy of companies to abuse the legal system as a way to bully and coerce people.
So if a child steals from a store that they go to without a parent, it should be OK because the minor can't afford to purchase the item?
Let's get this straight, copyright violation is not theft. They are legally different and they are obviously different on their face. When stealing from a store the store no-longer has the physical item they have spent money to be able to to sell.
The effect of copyright violation is that it possibly removes a potential customer. It's highly debatable as to how close to stealing that is but what is clear fact is that it is NOT the same thing.
Run IE and your machine will probalby get infected with tons of spyware which will cripple your machine if you do a lot of web browsing.
Run Mozilla and it probably won't.
That's been my experience so far.
Rating software's security as lower when they fix more bugs seems like it would motivate exactly the wrong behavior. Also, it's invalid on it's face. If IE has 1000 security flaws and fixes 10 and Mozilla has 50 and fixes 15 IE isn't more secure, before or after. There is no scientific measure of security but the bug fix count hardly seems worth looking at.
Anyone should be able to put any device on your network with all the authentication they can muster and not damage your network. This is security 101. Treat your users as hostile because sometimes, they are!
Let them use what they can but don't let them break anything that you couldn't fix. Not letting people use the tools you give them is a braindead solution to the problem. Granted, it may be a temporary necessity because your servers and services are next to impossible to secure any other way but long term, this is not the solution.
At work, it's not your computer and not your responsibility when something really bad happens.
And if I bring my own $300 Dell in and unplug the paper weight the corperate admin's won't let me use, that makes things better?
Like someone else pointed out, a company's job is to do something, not have secure computers. If your employees are checkout clerks, lock them down. If they are professionals, treat them as such or you just waste everyones time.
And every time you block a port, multiply the number of employees affected, 1%, and 2 hours to figure out how much company time you just wasted forcing people to work around your "security".