I think they made a mistake and meant to say Halo 3:-) There are lots more exciting game prospects than Halo 2 on the PC and only Microsoft can afford to tie their games to it -- sounds like it's a exercise for the new API & tech demo for developers rather than an enticing prospect for gamers.
If you've not got one yet, old XBoxes are a steal at the moment! Also Gamecubes are only £30, and you won't waste your investment on any games either... this awkward twilight for "current gen" games consoles will make life very cheap for a few months!
Sorry, as a gadget lover I've seen tons of phones come close to being fantastically useful as the grandparent poster describes. However the problem is *always* in the frigging software. There is always some stupid bug (or six) which stops a phone fulfilling its advertised potential, but the manufacturer doesn't give a toss about fixing any of them because they're busy redesigning the next model (or six) with completely different interfaces,
e.g. my Nokia 9500, bought March 2005. Hooray! A phone, web browser, email client and remote SSH terminal with 80x24 screen! Wi-fi support at home! Amazing! Except that:
the IMAP email client is hopelessly broken, crashing at the slightest provocation (changing folders mostly!)
the web browser, for all its other limitations, doesn't do gradual page rendering (well it tries, but effectively it doesn't), and freezes the phone up while rendering a long page. Not good when you have a 14Kb GPRS connection;
the terminal works well (cough, third party software) but is hamstrung by the phone's refusal to change connection types if the first one you pick doesn't work. You have a 10 minute timeout or something so that if a wi-fi connection doesn't work, you can't immediately switch to GPRS without going for a cup of tea first.
(unforgivably, for Nokia, at least) if you missed a call and want to see who it was, you press "last call log" from the front panel and it takes 10-20 seconds of "Reading log..." on the screen before it shows you. A list of numbers! That's all I'm asking for! Totally maddening.
No reset mechanism except taking the battery out. Because it will never crash, oh no. Especially not in the middle of a busy street when you're trying to make a call and then have to find a quiet place to take the f--king thing to pieces...
Now under normal circumstances, well, yeah you get bugs in software, we'll get them fixed! Except that you don't with phones. I had three firmware upgrades to that phone and none of those issues were solved. So I never really used it for email or web browsing unless I had a lot of time & patience, and it was very important to try to get a particular piece of info (still it was quicker calling the train times information line than trying to use the web site).
But really there was nothing wrong with the hardware -- I could see that the phone could do everything that it advertised, but Nokia were on to greener pastures now that this phone was out of the door. All it would need (in any other software market) would be a programmer or two, 2-3 months and some willing "power user" beta testers to hammer out these stupid bugs. I mean god forbid they actually try to make a device with a market lifespan of more than about 12 months, with, you know, a user community and long term support plans. But just a bit more love on the software after release would make a huge difference.
After a couple of terrible months with an HTC Universal (lots of problems but the biggest one is that it's impossible to answer an incoming call more than about 20% of the time! Great testing guys!), like an idiot I'll have a Nokia E61 on order soon. Maybe that'll work better:-)
So no I don't believe phone "convergence" is a myth when the phone manufacturers get so darned close. It's their unwillingness to go the extra mile after the phone has been released and tested on a large scale which causes people to damn their gadget-phones as white elephants.
I've heard a lot of people here talk about Lasik being the best option but if you're on a shoestring, you could consider the new LasikAtHome kit. Only $100, which is way cheaper than the $4000 you get charged for a "professional" job! Has anyone tried it?
So it's not a native PocketPC application but midpssh is GNU-free and has lots of ssh options including public key authentication. The only down side is the less-than-native-looking interface that you get from running J2ME, but the terminal is top notch. Definitely the best ssh application that I've found for the platform.
(previously on Slashdot...) Non-business customers won't tolerate the scam that Cisco make you go through when buying second-hand kit -- that they make sure you "relicense" the embedded software to the new owner when selling on your old kit (the software that's completely irrelevant to anything other than the hardware they sold it with). The list price of a "relicense" is usually 60-90% of the original hardware cost... Cisco say they're only getting what's due to them but it's just rather dubious attempt at control over a legitimate after-market.
I'm not sure that the business culture that produced this kind of revenue scraping is going to know how to sell to the general public.
We exhibited at the UK Linuxworld 2005 and because previous shows wanted like £300 for a 64Kb internet connection to the stand, it turned out to be cheaper for us to commit to paying that much over 1 year for an unlimited 3G/UMTS plan and PCMCIA card. We attached a wi-fi & 3G cards to a laptop, some software written in the car, and it turns out our portable hot-spot was providing 200-300Kb of internet access for several stands in the room that had found our AP. I like the principle but when the ridiculous per-MB usage charges kick in for 3G access it might not be so smart:-)
Xen has caused major shifts in business direction for commercial virtualisation companies: VMWare suddenly released their VMWare player in part as an effort to make their "virtual machine file format" the standard one. Look they even want to support virtualisation standards now! SWSoft kicked off OpenVZ for similar motivation: because Xen is a competing solution and (they gamble) that it is going to be better to give away a corresponding part of their "crown jewels" to get more of a market share.
Getting your virtualiser into the kernel (or a vendor tree) isn't about control, it's about being in technical pole position to sell copies of their commercial products. Xen might be free, and might have started this all off, but they too have a commercial arm, XenSource, trying to sell Xen Optimizer, presumably as a coda to other products. SWSoft have Plesk, HSPComplete, PEM and others. And VMWare has ESX/GSX server. All of their selling would be made easier, and their marketing departments made very happy, if the king of open source projects, Linux, includes parts of their core technology.
While I'm not sure what the critiera are for acceptance into the kernel, I don't think it's going to happen for SWSoft. From an engineering standpoint, their technology is not much different from Linux vserver which has been around a while to do much the same job and I imagine its invasive kernel changes to keep everything partitioned are just as (un)appealing to kernel maintainers. On the other hand the Xen kernel changes implement a new "architecture", albeit a virtual one, and (last I looked) were only around 150K in size. So I would have thought that the Xen guys have more of a shot at this one because the bulk of their software is maintained outside of the Linux kernel, and seems like the better solution from an engineering standpoint.
But with CPU virtualisation extensions becoming all the rage this year, I think it'll be a while before the best solution shakes itself out engineering-wise: there is still too much vendor "buy-in" for any of these solutions to seem like a good bet for the mainline kernel.
Also NB from the article that SWSoft have made lots of money from selling a modified Linux kernel, and yes for years before OpenVZ they would give out the sources to Virtuozzo licensees. It's not clear to me whether Virtuozzo uses a forked OpenVZ codebase and they are continuing to develop virtuozzo's kernel bits in secret (which would seem like madness on top of running openvz, but that's commerce for you:) ).
Assuming your intended recipient doesn't have some covert means of recording the messages (in which case this is as much nonsense as it sounds), what's wrong with sending a flash SMS which many mobile phones won't store? Plus it usually appears more prominently than a regular one. If that won't work, what about a one-time automated voice recording? You can't make data self-destruct if the receiver doesn't want it to:-)
If we're talking per-month prices, RHEL is more expensive than Windows Server 2003. As a small ISP we're able to buy Server 2003 monthly licenses with no up-front commitment at around the £8 / month mark. A customer asked for RHEL instead of our usual CentOS so we enquired on their behalf: we were amazed by the response. They wanted about £12 / month and a commitment to sell 100+ licenses per year. No thanks guys! They obviously feel they don't need to compete here, but I was very surprised.
I had always assumed this was the reason behind the atrocious lag on mobile phone GPRS connections. You might not notice 900ms on a web connection, but it is a pain in the backside for SSH and (of course) VoIP... however the same phone still allows me to have a normal conversation without the same delay! Does anyone know more about GSM/GPRS than me to dispel this, or is this more than just a conspiracy theory?
I'll see your quote and raise you another quote by actor Michael Caine: "The idea that money doesn't buy you happiness is a lie put about by the rich, to stop the poor from killing them".
As an owner of all three consoles and reasonably frequent game buyer (1 or 2 a month), I like the choice of being able to pick the best game on whatever platform... unfortunately when games come out on multiple platforms the GC always seems to be the more expensive version, and I'd be a fool to pick it after spending money on all the consoles just so I can get the best value:-) So for Price of Persia, XIII and more recently killer7, I went for the PS2 versions because, well, it they were all about £8 cheaper than the equivalent Gamecube edition.
Does Nintendo not see the value in paring down their costs for non-exclusive titles, just so that their GC owners (and fans of their exclusives, Zelda, Mario, Pikmin etc.) can build up a library on their platform? As it stands I really don't own many GC games, but I do appreciate the big N's higher quality control (loading times? what loading times?) and would like to enjoy it a bit more often.
Mind you, this is all from a cheapass who's bought maybe 4 games in the last 4 years actually *new*, and all the rest second hand:-)
This is an excellent article, and one that anybody with a brain could agree with. But it looks like the history behind this (the last 30 years or so) and the high-priced legal firms will do everything they can to keep the status quo.
Hmm, I don't know; they've been around for at least 30 years, but I always thought Status Quo's longevity was down to their catchy three chord tune structure and energetic live performance. While I'm in no way a fan, I'm not sure we need to push for laws against them.
daemontools and the free-er clone runit which both give you the advantages of a non-linear system startup process, automatic service restarting, no need to write daemon-ising code in each program etc. Each author also has common tools to use with these service supervision programs to ensure network-based daemons don't need to write network code: ucspi-tcp and ipsvd respectively.
Brave Deian owners can apt-get install runit-run which will start your system with/sbin/runit instead of init from then on; we tend to use it on top of the existing init scripts.
And the system that's had such a sensible service supervision system since the year dot? Windows NT and its service control manager. Of course you could argue a centrally-controlled daemon restarter is much more of a priority when you expect your daemons to crash more:-)
While plenty of people are suggesting shredding, why not just file your bank statements, phone bills and so on? They're important if you ever have a billing dispute, need to prove expenditure to your boss / the tax man, and keeping them in a ring binder or two means you don't have to worry about securely disposing of them.
The other option, as someone pointed out, is to "go paperless" -- some banks and utility companies in the UK give you a discount for opting for an "internet only" account where everything is managed through their web site, and they post you nothing. Again in the UK, we have the Data Protection Act which mandates that organizations storing personal data must supply individuals with copies of all such data relating to them for a maximum fee of £10. My previous bank sent me two reams of printouts when I asked them to a few years back (because I'd not kept records myself and had some tax issues to deal with). But it's a useful tool to ensure you don't have to keep your own records if you don't want to.
Personally I'd advocate keeping your statements, but the DPA is very useful if you need it.
I don't care who you're or how pretty the screensaver, just don't download programs for network abuse like this and expect your ISP to take it lightly. If you really want to take action against a phising site, call the ISP hosting it and complain to them. Same principle, less innocent parties affected along the way. If you don't get a response from that ISP, call the ISP further upstream... this is how we deal with network abuse; it's slow but it's legal, and it works.
Or for those who have an objection to using non-free software to do their accounts, draw all your income & expenses up on Openoffice, print it out, then pay an accountant to fill in your forms! It's a once a year expense and they should be able to save you *at least* their own fee on your taxes (£100 or so over here). Even if your taxes are so simple that they can't, it's much cheaper than making a mistake (given that our Inland Revenue will fine you pretty heavily for those).
This scheme would have hit a snag in the UK-- if anyone ever made a formal request under the Data Protection Act and paid you the requisite £10, you would have to print off and send them every personally identifiable piece of information stored about them. This would have to include the "stupid rating" by law:-)
You can do this for banks, supermarket loyalty cards, local council anyone who holds any data on you whatsoever...
Not necessarily-- the MythTV help page recommends budgeting for 1GHz per processor for doing software encoding, then cheap TV cards are an option. Alternatively us lucky people in Europe can receive MPEG2 streams over the air using DVB tuner cards, no encoding necessary.
More than once in Borders I've found a computer book for £30-40 that I will check with Amazon before buying in-store. Sometimes it's cheaper, sometimes I want the book now. As someone else said I expect Borders' friendly no-hassles attitude to change the moment they spot someone typing an ISBN into their phone (or snapping a barcode).
The problem is that, in the end, nobody really cares. Loading seamlessly is hard and raises system requirements quite a bit (since not only do you need to hold two levels in memory at times, but you also need to be loading an entire new level while the player is playing.)
I'm not sure nobody cares (it's not as if there's much competition in the massively-anticipated games of 2004 stakes), but getting rid of pauses doesn't necessarily mean huge technical hurdles. e.g. Metroid Prime makes you shoot uniform-sized doors to go between areas which often trigger a lot of disc-scratching from the Gamecube before they open and allow you through. Sometimes navigating a long S-shaped corridor hides some more disc scratching, and even the first Jak & Daxter, notable for allowing you to explore an enormous outdoor space without a pause (it drops maybe a frame or two when you move between areas), does force you down little channels across long beaches so that wherever you were is firmly out of view, or round the corner or whatever, before the new part of the island appears. So with my games fanboy hat on, I'd say there's no good reason to freeze the game entirely because it really breaks your immersion in the game, but there are some good creative ways of hiding it.
In UK pounds (and I suspect this applies to other countries that can take advantage of a weak dollar and fast connection) that's £27, slightly cheaper than I can get it at amazon.co.uk and slightly faster than in the shops.
As an ISP building servers for our own use, we've never had problems with Linux RAID-5 but plenty of problems with recalcitrant disc interfaces that won't easily support hot-swapping and/or clean reporting of drive failures. Even 3Ware cards (until relatively recent firmware revisions) could cause system crashes before they cleanly reported a drive as failed with Linux RAID-5 sitting on top (yes, Linux software RAID-5 is much faster than the hardware RAID-5 with their 8000 series cards). So my advice is just to test a failure: try unplugging a drive from a test array while it's running and see what happens. The "plug & play" aspect might not work as advertised but you shouldn't lose any data through it (we've not).
Slashdot Mirror
Price of your next Vista upgrade: £100-200 ?
:-) There are lots more exciting game prospects than Halo 2 on the PC and only Microsoft can afford to tie their games to it -- sounds like it's a exercise for the new API & tech demo for developers rather than an enticing prospect for gamers.
... this awkward twilight for "current gen" games consoles will make life very cheap for a few months!
Price of second-hand XBox + Halo 2 at Game: £60
I think they made a mistake and meant to say Halo 3
If you've not got one yet, old XBoxes are a steal at the moment! Also Gamecubes are only £30, and you won't waste your investment on any games either
Now under normal circumstances, well, yeah you get bugs in software, we'll get them fixed! Except that you don't with phones. I had three firmware upgrades to that phone and none of those issues were solved. So I never really used it for email or web browsing unless I had a lot of time & patience, and it was very important to try to get a particular piece of info (still it was quicker calling the train times information line than trying to use the web site).
But really there was nothing wrong with the hardware -- I could see that the phone could do everything that it advertised, but Nokia were on to greener pastures now that this phone was out of the door. All it would need (in any other software market) would be a programmer or two, 2-3 months and some willing "power user" beta testers to hammer out these stupid bugs. I mean god forbid they actually try to make a device with a market lifespan of more than about 12 months, with, you know, a user community and long term support plans. But just a bit more love on the software after release would make a huge difference.
After a couple of terrible months with an HTC Universal (lots of problems but the biggest one is that it's impossible to answer an incoming call more than about 20% of the time! Great testing guys!), like an idiot I'll have a Nokia E61 on order soon. Maybe that'll work better :-)
So no I don't believe phone "convergence" is a myth when the phone manufacturers get so darned close. It's their unwillingness to go the extra mile after the phone has been released and tested on a large scale which causes people to damn their gadget-phones as white elephants.
I've heard a lot of people here talk about Lasik being the best option but if you're on a shoestring, you could consider the new LasikAtHome kit. Only $100, which is way cheaper than the $4000 you get charged for a "professional" job! Has anyone tried it?
So it's not a native PocketPC application but midpssh is GNU-free and has lots of ssh options including public key authentication. The only down side is the less-than-native-looking interface that you get from running J2ME, but the terminal is top notch. Definitely the best ssh application that I've found for the platform.
(previously on Slashdot...) Non-business customers won't tolerate the scam that Cisco make you go through when buying second-hand kit -- that they make sure you "relicense" the embedded software to the new owner when selling on your old kit (the software that's completely irrelevant to anything other than the hardware they sold it with). The list price of a "relicense" is usually 60-90% of the original hardware cost ... Cisco say they're only getting what's due to them but it's just rather dubious attempt at control over a legitimate after-market.
I'm not sure that the business culture that produced this kind of revenue scraping is going to know how to sell to the general public.
We exhibited at the UK Linuxworld 2005 and because previous shows wanted like £300 for a 64Kb internet connection to the stand, it turned out to be cheaper for us to commit to paying that much over 1 year for an unlimited 3G/UMTS plan and PCMCIA card. We attached a wi-fi & 3G cards to a laptop, some software written in the car, and it turns out our portable hot-spot was providing 200-300Kb of internet access for several stands in the room that had found our AP. I like the principle but when the ridiculous per-MB usage charges kick in for 3G access it might not be so smart :-)
Xen has caused major shifts in business direction for commercial virtualisation companies: VMWare suddenly released their VMWare player in part as an effort to make their "virtual machine file format" the standard one. Look they even want to support virtualisation standards now! SWSoft kicked off OpenVZ for similar motivation: because Xen is a competing solution and (they gamble) that it is going to be better to give away a corresponding part of their "crown jewels" to get more of a market share.
:) ).
Getting your virtualiser into the kernel (or a vendor tree) isn't about control, it's about being in technical pole position to sell copies of their commercial products. Xen might be free, and might have started this all off, but they too have a commercial arm, XenSource, trying to sell Xen Optimizer, presumably as a coda to other products. SWSoft have Plesk, HSPComplete, PEM and others. And VMWare has ESX/GSX server. All of their selling would be made easier, and their marketing departments made very happy, if the king of open source projects, Linux, includes parts of their core technology.
While I'm not sure what the critiera are for acceptance into the kernel, I don't think it's going to happen for SWSoft. From an engineering standpoint, their technology is not much different from Linux vserver which has been around a while to do much the same job and I imagine its invasive kernel changes to keep everything partitioned are just as (un)appealing to kernel maintainers. On the other hand the Xen kernel changes implement a new "architecture", albeit a virtual one, and (last I looked) were only around 150K in size. So I would have thought that the Xen guys have more of a shot at this one because the bulk of their software is maintained outside of the Linux kernel, and seems like the better solution from an engineering standpoint.
But with CPU virtualisation extensions becoming all the rage this year, I think it'll be a while before the best solution shakes itself out engineering-wise: there is still too much vendor "buy-in" for any of these solutions to seem like a good bet for the mainline kernel.
Also NB from the article that SWSoft have made lots of money from selling a modified Linux kernel, and yes for years before OpenVZ they would give out the sources to Virtuozzo licensees. It's not clear to me whether Virtuozzo uses a forked OpenVZ codebase and they are continuing to develop virtuozzo's kernel bits in secret (which would seem like madness on top of running openvz, but that's commerce for you
Assuming your intended recipient doesn't have some covert means of recording the messages (in which case this is as much nonsense as it sounds), what's wrong with sending a flash SMS which many mobile phones won't store? Plus it usually appears more prominently than a regular one. If that won't work, what about a one-time automated voice recording? You can't make data self-destruct if the receiver doesn't want it to :-)
If we're talking per-month prices, RHEL is more expensive than Windows Server 2003. As a small ISP we're able to buy Server 2003 monthly licenses with no up-front commitment at around the £8 / month mark. A customer asked for RHEL instead of our usual CentOS so we enquired on their behalf: we were amazed by the response. They wanted about £12 / month and a commitment to sell 100+ licenses per year. No thanks guys! They obviously feel they don't need to compete here, but I was very surprised.
I had always assumed this was the reason behind the atrocious lag on mobile phone GPRS connections. You might not notice 900ms on a web connection, but it is a pain in the backside for SSH and (of course) VoIP... however the same phone still allows me to have a normal conversation without the same delay! Does anyone know more about GSM/GPRS than me to dispel this, or is this more than just a conspiracy theory?
I'll see your quote and raise you another quote by actor Michael Caine: "The idea that money doesn't buy you happiness is a lie put about by the rich, to stop the poor from killing them".
As an owner of all three consoles and reasonably frequent game buyer (1 or 2 a month), I like the choice of being able to pick the best game on whatever platform... unfortunately when games come out on multiple platforms the GC always seems to be the more expensive version, and I'd be a fool to pick it after spending money on all the consoles just so I can get the best value :-) So for Price of Persia, XIII and more recently killer7, I went for the PS2 versions because, well, it they were all about £8 cheaper than the equivalent Gamecube edition.
:-)
Does Nintendo not see the value in paring down their costs for non-exclusive titles, just so that their GC owners (and fans of their exclusives, Zelda, Mario, Pikmin etc.) can build up a library on their platform? As it stands I really don't own many GC games, but I do appreciate the big N's higher quality control (loading times? what loading times?) and would like to enjoy it a bit more often.
Mind you, this is all from a cheapass who's bought maybe 4 games in the last 4 years actually *new*, and all the rest second hand
This is an excellent article, and one that anybody with a brain could agree with. But it looks like the history behind this (the last 30 years or so) and the high-priced legal firms will do everything they can to keep the status quo.
Hmm, I don't know; they've been around for at least 30 years, but I always thought Status Quo's longevity was down to their catchy three chord tune structure and energetic live performance. While I'm in no way a fan, I'm not sure we need to push for laws against them.
daemontools and the free-er clone runit which both give you the advantages of a non-linear system startup process, automatic service restarting, no need to write daemon-ising code in each program etc. Each author also has common tools to use with these service supervision programs to ensure network-based daemons don't need to write network code: ucspi-tcp and ipsvd respectively.
/sbin/runit instead of init from then on; we tend to use it on top of the existing init scripts.
:-)
Brave Deian owners can apt-get install runit-run which will start your system with
And the system that's had such a sensible service supervision system since the year dot? Windows NT and its service control manager. Of course you could argue a centrally-controlled daemon restarter is much more of a priority when you expect your daemons to crash more
While plenty of people are suggesting shredding, why not just file your bank statements, phone bills and so on? They're important if you ever have a billing dispute, need to prove expenditure to your boss / the tax man, and keeping them in a ring binder or two means you don't have to worry about securely disposing of them.
The other option, as someone pointed out, is to "go paperless" -- some banks and utility companies in the UK give you a discount for opting for an "internet only" account where everything is managed through their web site, and they post you nothing. Again in the UK, we have the Data Protection Act which mandates that organizations storing personal data must supply individuals with copies of all such data relating to them for a maximum fee of £10. My previous bank sent me two reams of printouts when I asked them to a few years back (because I'd not kept records myself and had some tax issues to deal with). But it's a useful tool to ensure you don't have to keep your own records if you don't want to.
Personally I'd advocate keeping your statements, but the DPA is very useful if you need it.
But Dijjer does and works along very similar lines.
Yeah, but this is a call centre call. So 12 am for you is only about tea-time in New Delhi.
(Or for our American readers - New Delhi, India.)
For the other American readers, tea time is the time of day you ask Butler to bring tea and crumpets, around 4 in the afternoon.
I don't care who you're or how pretty the screensaver, just don't download programs for network abuse like this and expect your ISP to take it lightly. If you really want to take action against a phising site, call the ISP hosting it and complain to them. Same principle, less innocent parties affected along the way. If you don't get a response from that ISP, call the ISP further upstream... this is how we deal with network abuse; it's slow but it's legal, and it works.
Or for those who have an objection to using non-free software to do their accounts, draw all your income & expenses up on Openoffice, print it out, then pay an accountant to fill in your forms! It's a once a year expense and they should be able to save you *at least* their own fee on your taxes (£100 or so over here). Even if your taxes are so simple that they can't, it's much cheaper than making a mistake (given that our Inland Revenue will fine you pretty heavily for those).
This scheme would have hit a snag in the UK-- if anyone ever made a formal request under the Data Protection Act and paid you the requisite £10, you would have to print off and send them every personally identifiable piece of information stored about them. This would have to include the "stupid rating" by law :-)
You can do this for banks, supermarket loyalty cards, local council anyone who holds any data on you whatsoever...
Not necessarily-- the MythTV help page recommends budgeting for 1GHz per processor for doing software encoding, then cheap TV cards are an option. Alternatively us lucky people in Europe can receive MPEG2 streams over the air using DVB tuner cards, no encoding necessary.
More than once in Borders I've found a computer book for £30-40 that I will check with Amazon before buying in-store. Sometimes it's cheaper, sometimes I want the book now. As someone else said I expect Borders' friendly no-hassles attitude to change the moment they spot someone typing an ISBN into their phone (or snapping a barcode).
I'm not sure nobody cares (it's not as if there's much competition in the massively-anticipated games of 2004 stakes), but getting rid of pauses doesn't necessarily mean huge technical hurdles. e.g. Metroid Prime makes you shoot uniform-sized doors to go between areas which often trigger a lot of disc-scratching from the Gamecube before they open and allow you through. Sometimes navigating a long S-shaped corridor hides some more disc scratching, and even the first Jak & Daxter, notable for allowing you to explore an enormous outdoor space without a pause (it drops maybe a frame or two when you move between areas), does force you down little channels across long beaches so that wherever you were is firmly out of view, or round the corner or whatever, before the new part of the island appears. So with my games fanboy hat on, I'd say there's no good reason to freeze the game entirely because it really breaks your immersion in the game, but there are some good creative ways of hiding it.
In UK pounds (and I suspect this applies to other countries that can take advantage of a weak dollar and fast connection) that's £27, slightly cheaper than I can get it at amazon.co.uk and slightly faster than in the shops.
As an ISP building servers for our own use, we've never had problems with Linux RAID-5 but plenty of problems with recalcitrant disc interfaces that won't easily support hot-swapping and/or clean reporting of drive failures. Even 3Ware cards (until relatively recent firmware revisions) could cause system crashes before they cleanly reported a drive as failed with Linux RAID-5 sitting on top (yes, Linux software RAID-5 is much faster than the hardware RAID-5 with their 8000 series cards). So my advice is just to test a failure: try unplugging a drive from a test array while it's running and see what happens. The "plug & play" aspect might not work as advertised but you shouldn't lose any data through it (we've not).