This is probably the best thing you can do. Work with them in creating an overall document which will be your Service Level Agreement (SLA). In this document have specific tasks listed and general guidelines, things like the following:
Systems/Services will have a criticality assigned to them
business critical (BC)
department critical (DC)
service critical (SC)
non-critical (NC)
The level of criticality will determine levels of response time/support expected for that system or service
(BC) Reporting person is contacted by IT professional within 10-15 minutes with an assesment made to determine the nature of the problem and contact appropriate person(s) including possible management to get IT personnel immediately working on the problem
(DC) Reporting person is contacted by IT professional within 10-15 minutes with an assesment made to determine the nature of problem and management contacted to determine if action is immediately required (if after normal hours of operation) or if it can wait until normal business hours and worked on by appropriate IT professionals, BC events take precidence
(SC) Reporting person is contacted within 10-15 minutes (normal hours) or next morning by an IT professional with an assesment made to determine the nature of the problem and the appropriate IT professions start working to fix the problem BC, and DC events take precidence
Processes are created for tasks
Process for adding accounts
Process for installing software
Process for purchasing equipment
Process for installing equipment
Process for moving user desktop equipment
Process for recovery requests
Process for foo bar
Expected levels of uptime are agreeded upon
Budget requirements are tracked (i.e. tasks themselves are tracked so that time spent installing xyz piece of software on y number of systems can be used to show that X number dollars were needed for that task)
These are just some suggestions. This helps both the IT department as well as the user community because actions are tasked and tracked and accounted for. Budgets are also kept track of so that the money spent can be tracked (like when a Department Head starts yelling that the IT department is costing too much overhead the IT department can show that they spent $500k in time/manpower/infrastructure moving that Department Head's engineers to the shiny new building because he/she wanted the big office on the 4th floor).
Again, great job on ignoring the largest real estate bubble ever to hit a capitalist economy in your pro-union analysis.
You also seem to be forgetting the other important fact that last year saw a huge increase in the number of destroyed homes and properties due to Katrina and other powerful storms. Katrina alone destroyed 310,000+ homes.
...solutions that will open my doors...
You mean like to your home? How is this secure? I mean, truely, how? What your RFID only will respond to certain readers? Someone won't be able to have a portable reader connected to say a laptop that reads your RFID and uses that to program the correct response code to other readers?
...unlock my car...
I take it you didn't read the LA Times lately. For reference, go read this article and when you are done, do you REALLY think they won't be able to do something similar? In fact it will be even easier, they just watch a place that gets a lot of expensive cars, place a few RFID readers around, wait for you to leave and then walk up to your car and drive away. They wouldn't even need to spend several minutes "cracking" your car's code since they got it from you when you drove into the lot.
...log me on to my computer...
Get a fingerprint reader, or a smart card reader. Heck Sun has an entire system based on this for years, it will even move your active session from computer to computer (i.e. the applications you have open and running, your connections to other computers, the mozilla window on slashdot, the code you have compiling, etc...)
...control home automation...
Wow, you need to have a RFID "implanted" to do this? Why not a card or a chip, or widget that fits in your wallet? Why not that for ANY of the above? All you do with the implant is tag yourself for everyone else to see and track. A card/chip/widget can be easily changed. Same reason why you need to change passwords ever few weeks, it make it harder for someone to compromise and continue compromising your security.
Cuba has been embargo'ed since Castro rose to power. Cuba will continue to be embargo'ed until democracy is adopted and the current government is removed from power. You should know this by now, it has probably been that way longer then you have been on this earth.
The first console to sell to mainstream US market for a loss was the Sega Dreamcast. The second was/is the MS XBox, the third is the MS XBox360. Sega went out of business with the Dreamcast. MS is hemoraging money like there is no tomorrow in its Home Entertainment division.
What everyone seems to be forgetting is that everyone involved HAD VALID ID! All this will do is add another hoop for someone to jump through. A determined person/group will be able to attain valid ID's that are needed, be they foreign passports, visa's, green cards, US citizen ID's, Yo-JimBo Squeegy Card, etc... It won't matter. The only thing ID's will do is more easily allow people to gather data about you and or steal your identity.
It is a great program. We use it for DNS services as well, but it is vital in our setting up new subnets and keeping track of routers/subnets/DHCP blocks/servers... basically everything that goes on the network! We have around 8000 systems/devices across many different subnets. Once you get larger then a class A subnet, you truely need an application like this, otherwise you will start screwing things up by taking someone elses IP or forget that you already had another 10.1.12 subnet in existance (which consequently screws up ALL your spanning trees across all your routers...).
I agree there is a serious problem especially in the North East. The housing prices have gone through the roof around here. Where 6 years ago you could get a 2 bedroom home for $125k you can now bairly get the same home for $400k. And in that same timeframe salaries have bairly increased 5-10% total, which just about covers the costs of inflation, let alone the ~300% increase in home costs. I will be lucky to get anywhere near 10% of the costs of a home saved up to purchase one on my current salary. Heck 10 years ago, it was considered standard that you put down 20% of costs on the home when you bought it. Most people I know right now are getting "intrest only" loans, because that is all they can afford to do. Well, with an "intrest only" loan, you never pay off the priciple unless you make seperate payments. You are basically just throwing money away. In fact you might as well be renting, since at least when you rent, you get to call up the landlord and have them fix the things that break, with the intrest only loan, you need to fix those same things when they break, and you still don't own those items...
I will tell you straight up that there is one section that will always need programers and IT specialists which will never outsource them, government defense contractors/industry. These jobs can not be outsourced, plain and simple due to the nature of the products. If you are worried about having your job outsourced, go find a job at one of the big contractors, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, etc. The other place you will always find a job is in the government itself, local, state, or federal. Don't expect the pay to be nearly as competitive if you do work for the government and also expect to fight a lot of battles about technology itself. It takes years to institute a small change in the way things are done in the government, so the technology fields can be extremely frustrating because 6-12 months and there is already 4-5 better ways to do something.
All kinds of problems will arise with a setup like this. Performance will possbily boost for certain things, but they need to be coded properly themselves, but code is not written for a unique setup like this. Multi-threaded code will be under the assumption that all CPU's will have approximitely the same abilities (in other words, they do not split floating point ops into one thread and i/o and int operations into other threads). Any thread for the application will potentially have floating point operations mixed with other operations.
Now even if you custom code an application to do all floating point work in a specific thread, you would need to completely modify the kernel thread management sub-systems. The threads themselves would need meta flag data to signify what "kind" of thread they are so that the "floating point thread(s)" are queued for running on the GPU and not on the T1 (unless there are idle T1 cores and the GPU is already busy).
Now even if you have the above changed, the only thing this will work on is custom made applications, in other words, you will need to completely re-write anything and everything to take advantage of this setup. This really isn't viable when you may possibly be dealing with non-open-source products like Matlab or Oracle. Even with open source products, it will take MAJOR rework to implement a change like this.
The T1 is designed as it is, a multi-core processor that would make a very good NFS Data Server, ftp server, or web host server with highly efficient power usage. It is NOT a database, application, or HPC server core. Too many of the latter operations require too much floating point operations to be run efficiently on the T1. In a pinch you can use it for them, but it will not shine in that application.
You do know that is what the/etc/issue and/etc/issue.net files are for don't you? You can even have them referenced in ssh connections as well if you modify your pam config files.
Attention Cluster users...
Node90, node104, and node243 are down for maintainance/repair.
Please update pbs and lammpi configurations to reflect the
reduction of 12 processors. Thank you.
Basically the concept is on paper only. Why else would he be stating things like "If it works...", or "...could reduce...", "...might not need a catalyst..." etc.? It is because they havn't gotten a working prototype yet. They basically believe that their design could work, as they have done the chemical reaction analysis as well as a design analysis on how to cause the chemical reaction to occur quickly and efficently. But again, this is all on paper still. We don't even know yet if their results from the chemical reaction simulation are correct yet!
I agree with you completely on this. I think his main problem is that they WILL have to think outside the box again. This takes time and costs more money then just rehashing something you have already done in the past with maybe some new flashy graphics and some extra physics engine capability.
Heaven FORBID that they need to go back to the drawing board on HCI (Human Computer Interaction) because there is now a lot more capability that was just added to the HCI interface. This completely causes you to re-design full gameplay and get new test studies on how to do things. It makes the companies work again for the titles instead of chop/paste from the past. WOW! They need to take some time again to develop games... what a concept. The sky is falling because of this.
The buzz on the Revolution is that it will be 3rd-4th Q 2006. Nintendo has been very tight on any information on the Revolution, which is why they havn't needed to say that it is delayed. In a sense this is a good strategy. And don't compair this with "Duke Nukem: Whenever" either... Nintendo has done this in the past and has always come through with the product.
Personally I am looking forward towards it. They are really the one one that is working on new features other then "bigger, better, faster graphics"... I mean seriously, if you just want bigger, better, faster graphics, get a computer. It will cost you 10x the price but at least you can do other things as well with it.
They want their own GPS system, even though we have one already.
hmmmm... could it have something to do with the fact that the USA has the ability to shutdown, jam, or otherwise incompasitate any technology that uses the US GPS system? I mean, if you really think about it, would you ever base any of your own military systems on something that you know another country can shutdown?
I mean it is just plain idiotic for them to not create their own GPS system if they want to use the full capabilities out of it. Otherwise piggy-backing on the US system is just begging for problems if it ever was a critical part of they systems (nothing like having a GPS guided missle told that the location it was aimed at is the launch vehicle itself...).
There is an inherent problem with the current video game companies. Games have become too risk adverse. What I am trying to say is that games now cost almost as much as a movie to produce. The companies have mostly consolidated to a handfull of big names and have all pretty much become assembly lines of the same thing.
No one dares to take much of a chance of producing anything but the big three (on computers), first-person-shooter, real-time-strategy, or MMORPG. There might be some mixing between the three, but in the last 5-6 years, just about every game produced fits pretty easily into one of those three categories. There are a few exceptions here and there, but there are just that exceptions, not the rule. So, for teenagers, these three types of games are pretty much all they have ever seen their entire gaming lives. It would get boring after a while.
Fancier graphics aside, what is really different between 1993's Doom, and say 2005's FEAR? Yes we went from 2D sprites in a fairly flat 3D environment to a true 3D environment with full 3D people, and FEAR has a slow-motion "bullet-time" type effect, and multiplayer, but truefully what is really truely different gameplay wise? If I picked 1994's Doom II, we would even have multiplayer in the mix.
The market is simply saturated with these types of games in the PC realm. Even on consoles it isn't much better. There are 3-4 other types of game consoles have, sports games (basketball, baseball, football, hockey, soccer), hack+slash, racing, and fighting. Some of these even get a PC conterpart, save the hack+slash and sports. These two rarely are on the PC because its a pain to play hack+slash without a good controller. And you won't ever see a sports game because the games are all about being able to sell you another next year with the updated teams, line-ups, etc., which would be too easily hacked/patched into a game on a computer.
Again, not a whole lot new or different year-in, year-out in the last 8-10 years. It has been extremely rare over the last 6 years to see a "new" game in the mainstream market. Too much is spent now for a company to risk something new. If that "new" game does not become a hit game, the company is pretty much dead. But if they make a repeat, they might simply just make some money, and that is really what it is about to the ones that are left. The days of the innovaters is pretty much over. It is next to impossible to create a garage game anymore. Forget about consoles due to licensing fees, API development kit purchase agreements, etc.
Gaming itself has become stagnant. The innovaters were what made the gaming market so great in the 80's-90's. IT also helped that the technology was changing so much as well during that period of time. We went from 2D colored pixel blocks to life-like 3D renderings. From mono speaker beeps and blips to surround sound, studio/movie quality soundtracks (well voiceovers could use some acting skills work in most games, but that is more due to budget then the technology itself). But over the last 10 years, well, things havn't really changed all the much. Yes the 3D environemnts have more detail, round objects look "rounder", lights look more realistic, but in essence, nothing nearly as dramatic as the jump from 2D sprites to 3D objects and bit maps. In the past, the vastly different abilities helped bring new games all the time, but that isn't nearly the case anymore. Now we need the games themselves to be different, as the technology isn't changing as much as it has in the past.
On a side note, I think Nintendo is probably one of the only companies that is striving to inovate and invent right now. Everyone else is simply doing remakes...
That won't help if they do it correctly. You would need secure, encrypted connections between you and your annonomizer and even then, it really isn't that difficult to break 128bit keys anymore. They have the full contents off all your incomming and outgoing data traffic. In fact, going to an annonimizer will more likely FLAG you then it will if you do what "normal" people do.
Everytime MS buys a gamd company, the games then fall apart and then suck. I don't know what they do to them. Look at Bungie Soft, the same people who gave us the Marathon series and Myth series. Marathon was the FPS on Mac for forever, the Doom of the system, and in some aspects even more fun. And if you never played the first Myth: The Fallen Lords, you missed possibly the best real time tactics game ever made in the genera (or any after mods like WWII which converted everything into a WWII units of soldiers, medics, even tanks).
Then MS came... well, all I can say is go look for games that have the Bungie Studio's logo somewhere on the game now... They are most definitly NOT the only one this happened to. I firmely believe that MS does not have the corporate presence and structuring that is needed to actually produce good games. I personally believe they shreded the Mechwarrior series. Mechwarrior 2 is still the best in my opinion. But do you want to know why? It is because Activision at least gave a HUGE selection of mechs and weapons. There were more different mechs in Mechwarrior2+GhostBear Expansion then in ALL the later games in the series COMBINED. Part of the whole idea in that game is that you really DON'T know all the different mechs that might be feilded against you. That you don't know the weakness of everybody, or their strengths until you get smacked hard by something that surprised the crap out of you...
... when they havn't even ANNOUNCED the price? How do they know it will cost more then the Sun Enterprise 10000 that is sharing out MP3 files which are then decoded on a SunRay Thin Client and played for me at my desk? Huh? Huh? Riddle me that Batman...
I like being able to edit out commercials, run noise reduction, upconversion, de-interlacing, and other post processing on the shows and then burn to DVD's if I feal like it. Too bad no set-top-box DVR will ever allow that kind of function, but my home built HTPC does.
Backups themselves do not need a a fast performing medium. The 20 MBps speed of these disks will be fine for use in backup systems. Its ability to store vast amounts of data is where it will shine in this area.
Slashdot Mirror
- Systems/Services will have a criticality assigned to them
- business critical (BC)
- department critical (DC)
- service critical (SC)
- non-critical (NC)
- The level of criticality will determine levels of response time/support expected for that system or service
- (BC) Reporting person is contacted by IT professional within 10-15 minutes with an assesment made to determine the nature of the problem and contact appropriate person(s) including possible management to get IT personnel immediately working on the problem
- (DC) Reporting person is contacted by IT professional within 10-15 minutes with an assesment made to determine the nature of problem and management contacted to determine if action is immediately required (if after normal hours of operation) or if it can wait until normal business hours and worked on by appropriate IT professionals, BC events take precidence
- (SC) Reporting person is contacted within 10-15 minutes (normal hours) or next morning by an IT professional with an assesment made to determine the nature of the problem and the appropriate IT professions start working to fix the problem BC, and DC events take precidence
- Processes are created for tasks
- Process for adding accounts
- Process for installing software
- Process for purchasing equipment
- Process for installing equipment
- Process for moving user desktop equipment
- Process for recovery requests
- Process for foo bar
- Expected levels of uptime are agreeded upon
- Budget requirements are tracked (i.e. tasks themselves are tracked so that time spent installing xyz piece of software on y number of systems can be used to show that X number dollars were needed for that task)
These are just some suggestions. This helps both the IT department as well as the user community because actions are tasked and tracked and accounted for. Budgets are also kept track of so that the money spent can be tracked (like when a Department Head starts yelling that the IT department is costing too much overhead the IT department can show that they spent $500k in time/manpower/infrastructure moving that Department Head's engineers to the shiny new building because he/she wanted the big office on the 4th floor).You also seem to be forgetting the other important fact that last year saw a huge increase in the number of destroyed homes and properties due to Katrina and other powerful storms. Katrina alone destroyed 310,000+ homes.
You mean like to your home? How is this secure? I mean, truely, how? What your RFID only will respond to certain readers? Someone won't be able to have a portable reader connected to say a laptop that reads your RFID and uses that to program the correct response code to other readers?
...unlock my car...
I take it you didn't read the LA Times lately. For reference, go read this article and when you are done, do you REALLY think they won't be able to do something similar? In fact it will be even easier, they just watch a place that gets a lot of expensive cars, place a few RFID readers around, wait for you to leave and then walk up to your car and drive away. They wouldn't even need to spend several minutes "cracking" your car's code since they got it from you when you drove into the lot.
...log me on to my computer...
Get a fingerprint reader, or a smart card reader. Heck Sun has an entire system based on this for years, it will even move your active session from computer to computer (i.e. the applications you have open and running, your connections to other computers, the mozilla window on slashdot, the code you have compiling, etc...)
...control home automation...
Wow, you need to have a RFID "implanted" to do this? Why not a card or a chip, or widget that fits in your wallet? Why not that for ANY of the above? All you do with the implant is tag yourself for everyone else to see and track. A card/chip/widget can be easily changed. Same reason why you need to change passwords ever few weeks, it make it harder for someone to compromise and continue compromising your security.
Cuba has been embargo'ed since Castro rose to power. Cuba will continue to be embargo'ed until democracy is adopted and the current government is removed from power. You should know this by now, it has probably been that way longer then you have been on this earth.
Too bad there was a little too much truth mixed in there... That might be a reason why it was so painful to watch.
The first console to sell to mainstream US market for a loss was the Sega Dreamcast. The second was/is the MS XBox, the third is the MS XBox360. Sega went out of business with the Dreamcast. MS is hemoraging money like there is no tomorrow in its Home Entertainment division.
What everyone seems to be forgetting is that everyone involved HAD VALID ID! All this will do is add another hoop for someone to jump through. A determined person/group will be able to attain valid ID's that are needed, be they foreign passports, visa's, green cards, US citizen ID's, Yo-JimBo Squeegy Card, etc... It won't matter. The only thing ID's will do is more easily allow people to gather data about you and or steal your identity.
It is a great program. We use it for DNS services as well, but it is vital in our setting up new subnets and keeping track of routers/subnets/DHCP blocks/servers... basically everything that goes on the network! We have around 8000 systems/devices across many different subnets. Once you get larger then a class A subnet, you truely need an application like this, otherwise you will start screwing things up by taking someone elses IP or forget that you already had another 10.1.12 subnet in existance (which consequently screws up ALL your spanning trees across all your routers...).
I agree there is a serious problem especially in the North East. The housing prices have gone through the roof around here. Where 6 years ago you could get a 2 bedroom home for $125k you can now bairly get the same home for $400k. And in that same timeframe salaries have bairly increased 5-10% total, which just about covers the costs of inflation, let alone the ~300% increase in home costs. I will be lucky to get anywhere near 10% of the costs of a home saved up to purchase one on my current salary. Heck 10 years ago, it was considered standard that you put down 20% of costs on the home when you bought it. Most people I know right now are getting "intrest only" loans, because that is all they can afford to do. Well, with an "intrest only" loan, you never pay off the priciple unless you make seperate payments. You are basically just throwing money away. In fact you might as well be renting, since at least when you rent, you get to call up the landlord and have them fix the things that break, with the intrest only loan, you need to fix those same things when they break, and you still don't own those items...
I will tell you straight up that there is one section that will always need programers and IT specialists which will never outsource them, government defense contractors/industry. These jobs can not be outsourced, plain and simple due to the nature of the products. If you are worried about having your job outsourced, go find a job at one of the big contractors, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, etc. The other place you will always find a job is in the government itself, local, state, or federal. Don't expect the pay to be nearly as competitive if you do work for the government and also expect to fight a lot of battles about technology itself. It takes years to institute a small change in the way things are done in the government, so the technology fields can be extremely frustrating because 6-12 months and there is already 4-5 better ways to do something.
Now even if you custom code an application to do all floating point work in a specific thread, you would need to completely modify the kernel thread management sub-systems. The threads themselves would need meta flag data to signify what "kind" of thread they are so that the "floating point thread(s)" are queued for running on the GPU and not on the T1 (unless there are idle T1 cores and the GPU is already busy).
Now even if you have the above changed, the only thing this will work on is custom made applications, in other words, you will need to completely re-write anything and everything to take advantage of this setup. This really isn't viable when you may possibly be dealing with non-open-source products like Matlab or Oracle. Even with open source products, it will take MAJOR rework to implement a change like this.
The T1 is designed as it is, a multi-core processor that would make a very good NFS Data Server, ftp server, or web host server with highly efficient power usage. It is NOT a database, application, or HPC server core. Too many of the latter operations require too much floating point operations to be run efficiently on the T1. In a pinch you can use it for them, but it will not shine in that application.
You do know that is what the /etc/issue and /etc/issue.net files are for don't you? You can even have them referenced in ssh connections as well if you modify your pam config files.
Attention Cluster users... Node90, node104, and node243 are down for maintainance/repair. Please update pbs and lammpi configurations to reflect the reduction of 12 processors. Thank you.
Basically the concept is on paper only. Why else would he be stating things like "If it works...", or "...could reduce...", "...might not need a catalyst..." etc.? It is because they havn't gotten a working prototype yet. They basically believe that their design could work, as they have done the chemical reaction analysis as well as a design analysis on how to cause the chemical reaction to occur quickly and efficently. But again, this is all on paper still. We don't even know yet if their results from the chemical reaction simulation are correct yet!
Heaven FORBID that they need to go back to the drawing board on HCI (Human Computer Interaction) because there is now a lot more capability that was just added to the HCI interface. This completely causes you to re-design full gameplay and get new test studies on how to do things. It makes the companies work again for the titles instead of chop/paste from the past. WOW! They need to take some time again to develop games... what a concept. The sky is falling because of this.
Personally I am looking forward towards it. They are really the one one that is working on new features other then "bigger, better, faster graphics"... I mean seriously, if you just want bigger, better, faster graphics, get a computer. It will cost you 10x the price but at least you can do other things as well with it.
hmmmm... could it have something to do with the fact that the USA has the ability to shutdown, jam, or otherwise incompasitate any technology that uses the US GPS system? I mean, if you really think about it, would you ever base any of your own military systems on something that you know another country can shutdown?
I mean it is just plain idiotic for them to not create their own GPS system if they want to use the full capabilities out of it. Otherwise piggy-backing on the US system is just begging for problems if it ever was a critical part of they systems (nothing like having a GPS guided missle told that the location it was aimed at is the launch vehicle itself...).
No one dares to take much of a chance of producing anything but the big three (on computers), first-person-shooter, real-time-strategy, or MMORPG. There might be some mixing between the three, but in the last 5-6 years, just about every game produced fits pretty easily into one of those three categories. There are a few exceptions here and there, but there are just that exceptions, not the rule. So, for teenagers, these three types of games are pretty much all they have ever seen their entire gaming lives. It would get boring after a while.
Fancier graphics aside, what is really different between 1993's Doom, and say 2005's FEAR? Yes we went from 2D sprites in a fairly flat 3D environment to a true 3D environment with full 3D people, and FEAR has a slow-motion "bullet-time" type effect, and multiplayer, but truefully what is really truely different gameplay wise? If I picked 1994's Doom II, we would even have multiplayer in the mix.
The market is simply saturated with these types of games in the PC realm. Even on consoles it isn't much better. There are 3-4 other types of game consoles have, sports games (basketball, baseball, football, hockey, soccer), hack+slash, racing, and fighting. Some of these even get a PC conterpart, save the hack+slash and sports. These two rarely are on the PC because its a pain to play hack+slash without a good controller. And you won't ever see a sports game because the games are all about being able to sell you another next year with the updated teams, line-ups, etc., which would be too easily hacked/patched into a game on a computer.
Again, not a whole lot new or different year-in, year-out in the last 8-10 years. It has been extremely rare over the last 6 years to see a "new" game in the mainstream market. Too much is spent now for a company to risk something new. If that "new" game does not become a hit game, the company is pretty much dead. But if they make a repeat, they might simply just make some money, and that is really what it is about to the ones that are left. The days of the innovaters is pretty much over. It is next to impossible to create a garage game anymore. Forget about consoles due to licensing fees, API development kit purchase agreements, etc.
Gaming itself has become stagnant. The innovaters were what made the gaming market so great in the 80's-90's. IT also helped that the technology was changing so much as well during that period of time. We went from 2D colored pixel blocks to life-like 3D renderings. From mono speaker beeps and blips to surround sound, studio/movie quality soundtracks (well voiceovers could use some acting skills work in most games, but that is more due to budget then the technology itself). But over the last 10 years, well, things havn't really changed all the much. Yes the 3D environemnts have more detail, round objects look "rounder", lights look more realistic, but in essence, nothing nearly as dramatic as the jump from 2D sprites to 3D objects and bit maps. In the past, the vastly different abilities helped bring new games all the time, but that isn't nearly the case anymore. Now we need the games themselves to be different, as the technology isn't changing as much as it has in the past.
On a side note, I think Nintendo is probably one of the only companies that is striving to inovate and invent right now. Everyone else is simply doing remakes...
That won't help if they do it correctly. You would need secure, encrypted connections between you and your annonomizer and even then, it really isn't that difficult to break 128bit keys anymore. They have the full contents off all your incomming and outgoing data traffic. In fact, going to an annonimizer will more likely FLAG you then it will if you do what "normal" people do.
Then MS came... well, all I can say is go look for games that have the Bungie Studio's logo somewhere on the game now... They are most definitly NOT the only one this happened to. I firmely believe that MS does not have the corporate presence and structuring that is needed to actually produce good games. I personally believe they shreded the Mechwarrior series. Mechwarrior 2 is still the best in my opinion. But do you want to know why? It is because Activision at least gave a HUGE selection of mechs and weapons. There were more different mechs in Mechwarrior2+GhostBear Expansion then in ALL the later games in the series COMBINED. Part of the whole idea in that game is that you really DON'T know all the different mechs that might be feilded against you. That you don't know the weakness of everybody, or their strengths until you get smacked hard by something that surprised the crap out of you...
... when they havn't even ANNOUNCED the price? How do they know it will cost more then the Sun Enterprise 10000 that is sharing out MP3 files which are then decoded on a SunRay Thin Client and played for me at my desk? Huh? Huh? Riddle me that Batman...
I like being able to edit out commercials, run noise reduction, upconversion, de-interlacing, and other post processing on the shows and then burn to DVD's if I feal like it. Too bad no set-top-box DVR will ever allow that kind of function, but my home built HTPC does.
Backups themselves do not need a a fast performing medium. The 20 MBps speed of these disks will be fine for use in backup systems. Its ability to store vast amounts of data is where it will shine in this area.
If compatible, I would look at something like:8 9.html
http://www.storagetek.com/products/product_page23
Took it twice to be certain, scored a 27ms the first time and a 26ms the second...