The original mailbox must still be present in the original database and must still be connected to an Active Directory user account.
If the same woman in this story had come to us, she'd be completely screwed because it wasn't the messages that were deleted, it was the mailbox. The retention time for deleted mailboxes has to be determined based upon available disk space.
The second biggest is the one you mentioned: you need at least as much free space as the mail store used at the time of the backup. That's as large as 600 GB. The total time required to restore 600 GB of data from tape to a production Exchange server with over 1500 concurrent users is not 15 minutes. The required time increases as the transaction logs have to be replayed for differential backups. We don't generally have the luxury of keeping that much free disk space across the org either.
RSGs also require touching the production systems. That's not always an acceptable option.
Other people have harped on using "enterprise" backup solutions like Veritas (as though we don't) to get at individual mailboxes, but Exchange does not have per-mailbox backups. The "brick level" backups provided by Exchange are normal MAPI connections that read each message and record one by one. It's the equivalent of opening Outlook and exporting to a PST, and it runs at tens of MB per minute, not GB per minute.
Well, you've hit the nail on the head. Exchange isn't UNIX. It's a proprietary SQL database. It isn't plaintext on a tape, and to get data from it you need to have the database running in Exchange.
Yes, it's a lot of cruft, but you also get necessary corporate features out of Exchange with Outlook that are impossible to get out of Pine, mail, Thunderbird, you name it. Welcome to the reality of systems and email administration: little tricks and setups that work for individual users or small business almost never work the enterprise.
I doubt this is true. There are probably more than a hundred different archives, tarballs, and tape backups from which they could salvage most, if not all, of the poor woman's e-mail.
I would argue that that is untrue. It's also not necessarily economically feasible to do so. For example (which has no bearing on how anyone else does things; this is only an example):
We run an Exchange system for about 19,000 people over eight backend Exchange 2003 servers. To restore a mailbox from one of those servers without affecting the production system (which requires coordination from three financially separate groups), we must:
Put up a new domain controller in a three domain forest
Make a backup of the DC
Move it to a private network without a connection to the domain
Put up a new Exchange back end server on the private network
Restore the information store
Export the mail to a PST file
Restore the backup of the DC and put it in DS restore mode
Return the DC to the network, allow replication to overwrite its db
Demote and decommission the DC
Total time: estimated at 60 hours of work (20 hours, 3 people).
No one, and I mean NO ONE at any level of the organization gets mailboxes restored. Backups are for disaster recovery only and are recycled after two weeks. If someone loses all their mail then waits thirty days to tell us, it's no longer possible to do the work, even if it's ordered by the organization head.
Now imagine Lycos, providing a free email service for many thousands more users. How long do you think their retention time for backups is, when they provide no positive affirmation that they can restore the data? How much time and hardware (servers, backup devices, backup media) do you think they'd be willing to put into restoring free email? How many FTEs would they have to dedicate only to that task? How likely would you be to go through 60 hours of work to restore a peon's mailbox in your own organization after you specifically told them what to do to prevent it from being deleted in the first place?
I feel bad for the person that lost her email and think the customer service guy's a douche, but I also don't doubt that Lycos is not in a position to restore the mail even if they wanted to and wouldn't fault them for saying No even if they could. That's reality.
Of course the lawyers get consulted first. The litigious society in which we live dictates it. People at zoos who climb over fences, moats, pits and fire traps past multiple signs that say "Do not go beyond this sign or you will be eaten" successfully sue the zoo when the lion bites their hand off.
One misstep in any direction by a company can result in being sued out of business so the lawyers are consulted first. That makes the company evil. People will sue over any perceived injury. That makes people evil.
The world would be a better place if only people were better, but saying so is pissing in the wind.
Longevity research shouldn't be blocked because it can increase the population, but the benefits of that research should be restricted to people willing to make sacrifices in other parts of life. If there were a treatment that could slow the aging process and allow people to live an extra fifty years, anyone choosing to undergo the treatment should be required to forfeit the right to reproduce and should not be permitted the same retirement, social security and other welfare benefits as the naturals would receive.
There are all kinds of arguments about how it may be unfair to have restrictions like this, but there can never be fairness with life and death, only balance. The reality is there are people like me who don't want children and don't mind working an extra twenty years to live another fifty. Everyone has the right to reproduce, everyone has the right to collect social security and their pension, but not everyone has the right to live beyond their natural means. Sometimes you have to give something up (like part of your paycheck now, or the right to reproduce) in order to get something else later on (social security checks, or an unnaturally long life).
Because that puts the load on the server, not on the client. If you have 10 users that are all analyzing 6 GB files and converting their contents to another format over Citrix, that server is dead.
It's a lot cheaper to have people download the files from a $4,000 server and crunch them locally than have them connect to a $50,000 server and crunch them remotely at 1/10th the speed.
But take a look at the available memory of the PS3: 256 MB system RAM, 256 MB video RAM. If you're not stuffing your textures and data into small packages and using custom extractors, then your single 512 MB texture (Doom 3, for example, offered larger texture sizes than this, and was released over 26 months ago) isn't going to fit.
This exemplifies two of the biggest weaknesses consoles have (games are not installed to the hard drive, video cards and other hardware is outdated before release date), and why the PS3, though certainly a capable set of hardware, is rapidly being eclipsed technologically.
I'm not saying the PS3 isn't going to be popular or that it won't be a great gaming platform. I am saying that having a 25 GB optical disc is no different than having 3x8 GB DVDs, and having last year's hardware with larger disc capacity doesn't put the PS3 at the cusp of some great new era in games development. When I play PS3, I'm going to expect a lot of LOADING messages and loutish behavior from PC fans. That's just how it goes with consoles.
It's not about what I believe, it's not about what I think. You made a factually incorrect statement while bitching about the EULA, I corrected you. If you've already read it once then I'm not sure how you missed the clearly typed information that contradicted you. It's in the GP if you'd like to see it.
You keep making that error, too, because you asked me "do you believe it's forbidden?" What part of "you may use the software only as expressly permitted" is unclear? Or "Microsoft reserves all other rights?" It's an EULA; it's legalese. This is what lawyers use to cover their asses in court. The answer to your question, which is printed in the EULA, is as clear and encompassing as it gets.
Seriously, who modded this guy insightful? He read the EULA, decided its most clear passages on what rights are permitted and denied magically does not apply to him. It's not insightful for someone to say "Thanks for the teacup!" when you've handed them a 2x4.
I didn't say that the EULA made any sense, at all, or that it was enforceable, or that Microsoft would ever necessarily enforce any of the terms of the agreement.
I did not say I agree with it. I did not do anything except show you how your argument, based as it was, did not hold up to scrutiny
just because they grant a right to some versions doesn't mean you don't have that right when it isn't explicitly granted
But this is not correct. If you take the time to read the EULA, you'll see the section:
SCOPE OF LICENSE. The software is licensed, not sold. This agreement only gives you some
rights to use the software. Microsoft reserves all other rights. Unless applicable law gives you more
rights despite this limitation, you may use the software only as expressly permitted in this agreement.
If the EULA doesn't say you can do something, then the EULA says you can't do it.
Re:No-CD Cr4kz: How Can You Trust Them?
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Pirates Vs. Publishers
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The warez scene is a complicated network of people and groups whose rewards are not monetary. The chief reward is recognition and reputation. It seems silly, but how much different is "I work for Google," or "I'm in the Army," from "I'm in RELOADED?"
The primary suppliers of cracks--the big-time groups, like RELOADED--have their reputations on the line with every release they do, and those releases are thoroughly checked by other groups long before they trickle down to you or me. It's a competition between groups that breeds quality; poor quality releases are nuked. There's more information on the topic here.
In this sense, trusting these sources of cracks is entirely rational. You're more likely to get a rootkit from, say, Sony or Starforce, than you are from a cracked game. Cracked games are heavily peer reviewed for benefits to the community, while companies do their work under cloak for benefits to themselves. That's one of the reasons it's said that pirates are successful: they produce a better quality product.
They'll also sell a lot of Vista licenses to offices whose IT shops want to maintain only a single platform. Once they start having to buy new PCs with Vista, they'll want to upgrade the entire shop. The larger the ratio of users to IT, the more they're going to standardize their systems. It's a convenience for them, like replacing the lightbulbs all at once rather than waiting for them to burn out.
This isn't true, especially not for such a major shift that Vista's bringing. It requires training for the IT staff and the end-users, or they can continue to run XP. Software Assurance has always permitted downgrade licensing, also, such that someone can buy an XP Pro license and instead run 2000. The same will be true for Vista.
Besides, what's easier to do: upgrade your entire organization with a new image for the same hardware platform buying new licenses for each PC, or keep the functioning licenses and image?
and what's with the single tab display properties? What's the point of a tab bar, when you have always one single tab in it? We'll never know.
The answer is that the code to modify display properties is specially crafted and actually requires that it be displayed in a tab. This is true for a lot of applets in Windows. There are explanations for it from the Vista shell team at their blog site's forums.
There's a lot of creative reasons why Windows still looks like Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 and does so in a nicely inconsistent manner, but they all add up to "it would have been really hard to change that, so we had to make sacrifices and do other stuff." All the answers from the blog team are fluff and excuses, saying they didn't have the time or the resources to get it done and that other things were more important. After five years. After $20 billion spent in R&D. After $5 billion spent just on Vista. With 40,000 employees world-wide. With $38 billion in the bank. So there are windows with a single tab that can't be resized that have text boxes too small to fit their text.
What it seems to actually be is a 1,723 word (with associated screen-shots) criticism of Yahoo!'s product.
It all makes me wonder if the author even bothered to give Yahoo! feedback on their product, or just wanted to show off their l33t ranting ability.
I had my... I like and dislike... I consider... Bottom line for me... more valuable to me... makes me wonder...
Yeah, I totally agree. When will people learn to keep their opinions to themselves? What do they think the Internet is, some kind of medium for the free-flow and exchange of ideas? He should wake up; nothing said by anyone on the Internet should have been said, ever, because someone somewhere will disagree and it's wrong to force someone else into that position. Just wrong.
Malicious software can disable the Security Center. Malicious software like, net stop wscsvc or Active Directory (Security Center is disabled when joined to a domain).
Don't kid yourself: this article isn't about Microsoft not playing fair, it's about Symantec and McAfee and a bunch of other companies with a lot of money balanced entirely on the notion that Windows is insecure and untrustworthy collectively crapping their pants at the idea that people might figure out their software is cheap makeup on a dirty whore.
RAID-1 costs even more money than RAID-5. RAID-5 is n-1, RAID-1 is n/2.
There is the consideration of size, weight, and durability with drives that you don't have with tapes. If you drop a tape, big deal. If you drop a drive, goodbye drive.
Speed's already been covered. We're talking about data they don't even keep on nearline storage. It's on VHS (reading/writing speed: 1x) and DVD. A single tape (that holds 186 DVDs) on a shelf is a much better solution for this situation than three hard drives (140 DVDs) always on requiring administration and power. RAID is overkill on every level for this business.
And yes, 300 GB is the sweet spot for SCSI drives these days. This would be enterprise level data storage for a business, not your MP3s.
Disk space costs 44 times as much as tape space. That means they could make copies on 44 different tapes and pay the same as they would for disk space. RAID setups are for high availability (and nerds' wet dreams). If the current setup is VHS and DVD, I don't think they're looking for immediate fail-over redundancy and high speed I/O.
No, Vienna is the codename for the ultimate successor to Vista with a release called Fiji in between the two; Longhorn Server is the server version of Vista that will be released well after Vista.
Does no one remember how to get to Google any more?
Mars is the second most hospitable planet we know, after Earth. The only resource we don't know for sure that it has is uranium ore. The only really annoying thing is the giant long-duration dust storms.
But we know it doesn't have oxygen, liquid water, life, or an environment that would support industry. Like I said, Mars is the Club Med of other planets but on its best day and Earth's worst it's still a death trap compared to Earth.
Humans survive in Antarctica and the deep sea solely by means of a metric buttload of technology. Take it away and they die in seconds or minutes. Mars is different only in degree, not kind.
Mars is different in kind more than you seem to realize. What do Antarctica and the deep sea have that Mars doesn't? Oxygen, water, and a magnetic field.
If by "flourished" you mean "nearly all the big, elaborate organisms were snuffed out".
...leading to the evolution of all the big, elaborate organisms you see today, including humans. Yeah, that worked out really badly for life.
No. We have done virtually no serious work on discovering Martian life (HPLC-tandem mass spec with chiral columns), and the conditions are within the known acceptable range for Earth-type microbes (sunlight, porous minerals, and temperature and pressure compatible with condensed-phase water).
If life exists on Mars then life exists in a diminished capacity that hasn't been seen on Earth in hundreds of millions of years. My point stands: whatever forms of life may exist on Mars pale in comparison to what you find on Earth.
Don't be silly. You don't have to completely atomize Earth for the four horsemen to ride. A nice big asteroid coming in at 50 km/s and hitting a nice thick layer of limestone would likely make the human race go extinct. Being caught in a beam from a supernova or similar high-energy event would be very bad. Having some idiots set off a 20 stage thermonuclear bomb, just to see how far down the crust really goes, would give the human race a run for its money.
But the point wasn't what will kill us, it's what would it take for Earth to be a worse choice than Mars. We'd need to lose oxygen, water, the magnetic field, geothermal heat (which I didn't mention), and then we'd be on equal footing with Mars. To make Mars start looking attractive Earth would need to lose access to sunlight and it would have to be harder to live here than it is to live there. Yes, there are some bad things that can happen to Earth. Mars is already a disaster.
Finally... fuck sensible? How can I argue with that.
Life does not equal humans. There are plenty of ways that life could stick around and still eradicate all humans. Or all human civilization. Either or, because without civilization, we're just another species waiting to be extinguished. And human civilization is really fragile.
But humans require life to exist. This is a point I made which you chose to overlook. Animals require other life to exist and when faced with the option of a) hang around where life exists even through extreme protracted periods of mass extinction which can lead to food or b) go to a dead lifeless world that lacks the major supporters of life (oxygen, liquid water, a magnetic field, and other life, all of which I mentioned), sticking to option A is the sensible one.
You also have this naive idea that without civilization we're just sitting ducks waiting to be picked off. Humans and their direct ancestors have survived for over three million years. Modern humans have existed for the last two-hundred fifty thousand years. During that time there have been some pretty shitty days too, like the ice age whose remnants we're currently shaking off. Civilization is fragile. Humankind isn't.
You make a reasonable point about a lethal environment but fail to acknowledge my point that that same environment will work on Earth.
You fail to make any kind of reasonable point with "you want to wait until we are" running out of resources. The resources that really matter--oxygen, water, other life, materials that have already been refined--exist on Earth. Not Mars.
I'm not sure I even understand your third point. Mars is better than Earth because we'd have to make it and understand it? I see it that Earth is better than Mars because you don't have to understand it for life to survive. That's a lot of work already done when it comes to the survival game. You then contradict yourself by saying we're really bad at ecological engineering (so that's why we should place our bets on it?).
Interesting? Not really. With the resources on Earth and the fact that life will survive here even through catastrophic events, Mars is not the place to be. Mars kills life; Earth fosters it.
Comments like this always blow my mind. It makes my brain throb like I just drank a milkshake. No one ever stops to hear themselves actually speak them and so apparently don't realize how mind-numbingly dumb they are (the words, not the people). I'm talking, of course, about this line:
"Mars--the backup planet, the backup plan."
Mars is one of the least hospitable and most difficult to reach places you could hope to find. Sure, Mars is probably the Club Med of all the other planets and satellites in the solar system but to believe truly that it is a sensible safe place to escape is nonsense. The least hospitable places on Earth are still way, way less lethal than Mars. That's right--lethal. Mars is not kind to even microbial life. We've come up with a lot of creative ways to peek around Mars looking for signs of it and the best we've found is the possibility that it was there but died a really, really long time ago. That's a nice big "No Trespassing" sign. Violators are killed on sight.
Contrast with Earth, on whose worst day life still flourished. Believe it or not, there have been some pretty shitty days down here, like the Cambrian-Ordovician extinction, the Ordovician-Silurian extinction, the Permian-Triassic extinction (80+% extinction in a million years, not bad), our favorite the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction, and our own Holocene extinction. When the shit goes down on Earth it is still far, far more habitable than any extra-terrestrial location. Animal life requires other life if it wants to survive. Starting from scratch on a lifeless planet is much harder (and strikes me as much less sensible) than sticking around where life has clung with tenacity for the last 3.5 billion years.
The exception to this would be a planetary catastrophe that left no room for doubt that Earth would be less habitable than Mars is now--that would result in the total loss of liquid water, the burn up of all atmospheric oxygen, the loss of the Earth's magnetic field, the death and extinction of all life (from microbes on up), and the tipping point of sunlight being blocked from reaching the ground. Following this it would have to be more difficult to use resources available to eke out survival on Earth than it would be to use resources to reach another planet and start anew there.
One point that's often brought up is that if we start now we can have people living sustainably on Mars who could carry on without the need for Earth, thus preserving our human legacy. I'm of the belief that when we are sufficiently technologically advanced to achieve such a result that a planet-wide catastrophe will be easily weathered right here using that same technology.
It's like the guy saying string theory is eating up valuable resources that could be used elsewhere and everyone else saying it's too fun to give up. Dreams of colonizing Mars and living out our Ray Bradbury fantasies are too fun to give up, but don't bandy about the idea that it's anything remotely serious. At least string theory has some sensible math to back it up; there's little that's sensible about martian life as the human-kind "backup plan."
Actually no, it doesn't. Read up on the opinions written by Thomas Jefferson and George Washington regarding the owning of slaves - the founders who did own slaves by and large owned them ONLY so that their positions as wealthy, powerful men would not be questioned. They were well aware of the contradiction between advocating freedom and owning slaves.
That's called a reason, not an excuse. It's like saying "I only beat my dog so the cat knows not to fuck with me." Truly honorable men do not trade others' lives for wealth and power.
Owning slaves was inexcusable and if they truly believed it was wrong then their legacy is tainted with hypocrisy. I know slavery is wrong, but if I were to make a great deal of money from owning one would it be considered acceptable to continue the practice? I would be no more excused for it than they should be.
I appreciate we're able to see fairly eye to eye on this issue. I think my objection was based largely in part on this idea:
I completely agree. I'm not saying they didn't construct a government that allowed slavery and denied women the vote - I'm saying that to say that was their legacy would be unfair at least.
I'd say their legacy is an accumulation of the things they did and that 99.9% of people have only good things to say about them. The other.1% has plenty of good things to say about them as well but isn't going to let the idea of tarnishing their reputation stop them from voicing an opinion or stating a fact from their legacy--and is probably smart enough to realize that such an opinion or opening of facts only serves to provide further illumination on the past, the present, and how things came to be this way. Such information is very unlikely to sway the opinion of someone who holds them in high regard to a primarily negative opinion. The true effect is that some people may lower their opinion of the founding fathers, but there is no way they will come to be seen as villians; to suppress opinions or facts on the idea that we mustn't forget others belies the insecurity of those others.
Regardless of the manner in which that information is presented, stating such furthers our own knowledge and understanding and should be lauded, not derided or hidden (as you imply it should be, in that it "cheapen"s their legacy).
In the context of their world-view, the founding fathers did do well and succeeded in many of their goals. In the context of our world-view they failed to meet the expectations we have of calling a country free and the people equal. In the context of a future world-view I'm sure the people will believe that we have failed to meet their expectations of what it means to be free and have equality (through at least three hotly debated issues, homosexuality, abortion and immigration).
Contextually the criticism levied against the founding fathers is completely warranted, appropriate, and expected from a modern American. Whatever their goals, however noble their intentions, however good their hearts, the founding fathers did construct the supreme law of the land to allow slavery, deny women the right to vote, and a host of other things we find distasteful and it is the right thing to do to acknowledge those shortcomings and acknowledge that the people of modern eras have tried to bring greater peace and freedom to their country.
Your claim that women were not specifically barred from voting by the constitution is correct but misleading. The 14th and 15th amendments explicitly give the right to vote to men and explicitly do not forbid gender discrimination. The constitution is implicitly saying that denying suffrage for women is legal and acceptable and that there is no constitutional argument that would provide them with those rights, despite the very clear opportunity to prevent such discrimination and division. When it comes to the fine language of the law, what you don't say is as important as what you do.
I agree with your first remark; if they're getting glowing reviews then that doesn't qualify as "Totally Sucks." But I stand by my original statement, which is that they haven't been known for that. They've had their chipsets out for a while now without much to show for it. nForce is still winning that battle.
I kind of have to agree with your second one too, in that getting Intel's blessing is usually a pretty good sign. But even if with some value they won't necessarily crank anything out worth buying or anything that might do better than nForce.
Anecdotally, almost all my experiences with ATI have been terrible when it comes to driver support and I don't have a lot of faith in them when it comes to doing right by their consumers beyond the six month period following purchase (or at all for non-Windows users). Intel is evil because of their G series chipsets. Their integrated graphics have been the source of headaches for the last nine years. ATI and Intel is like having a giant douche serve you a turd sandwich. Being served a free meal is usually nice, but you have to really consider all the factors, and I just don't see the two of them pulling through.
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The second biggest is the one you mentioned: you need at least as much free space as the mail store used at the time of the backup. That's as large as 600 GB. The total time required to restore 600 GB of data from tape to a production Exchange server with over 1500 concurrent users is not 15 minutes. The required time increases as the transaction logs have to be replayed for differential backups. We don't generally have the luxury of keeping that much free disk space across the org either.
RSGs also require touching the production systems. That's not always an acceptable option.
Other people have harped on using "enterprise" backup solutions like Veritas (as though we don't) to get at individual mailboxes, but Exchange does not have per-mailbox backups. The "brick level" backups provided by Exchange are normal MAPI connections that read each message and record one by one. It's the equivalent of opening Outlook and exporting to a PST, and it runs at tens of MB per minute, not GB per minute.
Well, you've hit the nail on the head. Exchange isn't UNIX. It's a proprietary SQL database. It isn't plaintext on a tape, and to get data from it you need to have the database running in Exchange.
Yes, it's a lot of cruft, but you also get necessary corporate features out of Exchange with Outlook that are impossible to get out of Pine, mail, Thunderbird, you name it. Welcome to the reality of systems and email administration: little tricks and setups that work for individual users or small business almost never work the enterprise.
We run an Exchange system for about 19,000 people over eight backend Exchange 2003 servers. To restore a mailbox from one of those servers without affecting the production system (which requires coordination from three financially separate groups), we must:
- Put up a new domain controller in a three domain forest
- Make a backup of the DC
- Move it to a private network without a connection to the domain
- Put up a new Exchange back end server on the private network
- Restore the information store
- Export the mail to a PST file
- Restore the backup of the DC and put it in DS restore mode
- Return the DC to the network, allow replication to overwrite its db
- Demote and decommission the DC
Total time: estimated at 60 hours of work (20 hours, 3 people).No one, and I mean NO ONE at any level of the organization gets mailboxes restored. Backups are for disaster recovery only and are recycled after two weeks. If someone loses all their mail then waits thirty days to tell us, it's no longer possible to do the work, even if it's ordered by the organization head.
Now imagine Lycos, providing a free email service for many thousands more users. How long do you think their retention time for backups is, when they provide no positive affirmation that they can restore the data? How much time and hardware (servers, backup devices, backup media) do you think they'd be willing to put into restoring free email? How many FTEs would they have to dedicate only to that task? How likely would you be to go through 60 hours of work to restore a peon's mailbox in your own organization after you specifically told them what to do to prevent it from being deleted in the first place?
I feel bad for the person that lost her email and think the customer service guy's a douche, but I also don't doubt that Lycos is not in a position to restore the mail even if they wanted to and wouldn't fault them for saying No even if they could. That's reality.
Of course the lawyers get consulted first. The litigious society in which we live dictates it. People at zoos who climb over fences, moats, pits and fire traps past multiple signs that say "Do not go beyond this sign or you will be eaten" successfully sue the zoo when the lion bites their hand off.
One misstep in any direction by a company can result in being sued out of business so the lawyers are consulted first. That makes the company evil. People will sue over any perceived injury. That makes people evil.
The world would be a better place if only people were better, but saying so is pissing in the wind.
Longevity research shouldn't be blocked because it can increase the population, but the benefits of that research should be restricted to people willing to make sacrifices in other parts of life. If there were a treatment that could slow the aging process and allow people to live an extra fifty years, anyone choosing to undergo the treatment should be required to forfeit the right to reproduce and should not be permitted the same retirement, social security and other welfare benefits as the naturals would receive.
There are all kinds of arguments about how it may be unfair to have restrictions like this, but there can never be fairness with life and death, only balance. The reality is there are people like me who don't want children and don't mind working an extra twenty years to live another fifty. Everyone has the right to reproduce, everyone has the right to collect social security and their pension, but not everyone has the right to live beyond their natural means. Sometimes you have to give something up (like part of your paycheck now, or the right to reproduce) in order to get something else later on (social security checks, or an unnaturally long life).
Because that puts the load on the server, not on the client. If you have 10 users that are all analyzing 6 GB files and converting their contents to another format over Citrix, that server is dead.
It's a lot cheaper to have people download the files from a $4,000 server and crunch them locally than have them connect to a $50,000 server and crunch them remotely at 1/10th the speed.
But take a look at the available memory of the PS3: 256 MB system RAM, 256 MB video RAM. If you're not stuffing your textures and data into small packages and using custom extractors, then your single 512 MB texture (Doom 3, for example, offered larger texture sizes than this, and was released over 26 months ago) isn't going to fit.
This exemplifies two of the biggest weaknesses consoles have (games are not installed to the hard drive, video cards and other hardware is outdated before release date), and why the PS3, though certainly a capable set of hardware, is rapidly being eclipsed technologically.
I'm not saying the PS3 isn't going to be popular or that it won't be a great gaming platform. I am saying that having a 25 GB optical disc is no different than having 3x8 GB DVDs, and having last year's hardware with larger disc capacity doesn't put the PS3 at the cusp of some great new era in games development. When I play PS3, I'm going to expect a lot of LOADING messages and loutish behavior from PC fans. That's just how it goes with consoles.
It's not about what I believe, it's not about what I think. You made a factually incorrect statement while bitching about the EULA, I corrected you. If you've already read it once then I'm not sure how you missed the clearly typed information that contradicted you. It's in the GP if you'd like to see it.
You keep making that error, too, because you asked me "do you believe it's forbidden?" What part of "you may use the software only as expressly permitted" is unclear? Or "Microsoft reserves all other rights?" It's an EULA; it's legalese. This is what lawyers use to cover their asses in court. The answer to your question, which is printed in the EULA, is as clear and encompassing as it gets.
Seriously, who modded this guy insightful? He read the EULA, decided its most clear passages on what rights are permitted and denied magically does not apply to him. It's not insightful for someone to say "Thanks for the teacup!" when you've handed them a 2x4.
I didn't say that the EULA made any sense, at all, or that it was enforceable, or that Microsoft would ever necessarily enforce any of the terms of the agreement. I did not say I agree with it. I did not do anything except show you how your argument, based as it was, did not hold up to scrutiny
The warez scene is a complicated network of people and groups whose rewards are not monetary. The chief reward is recognition and reputation. It seems silly, but how much different is "I work for Google," or "I'm in the Army," from "I'm in RELOADED?"
The primary suppliers of cracks--the big-time groups, like RELOADED--have their reputations on the line with every release they do, and those releases are thoroughly checked by other groups long before they trickle down to you or me. It's a competition between groups that breeds quality; poor quality releases are nuked. There's more information on the topic here.
In this sense, trusting these sources of cracks is entirely rational. You're more likely to get a rootkit from, say, Sony or Starforce, than you are from a cracked game. Cracked games are heavily peer reviewed for benefits to the community, while companies do their work under cloak for benefits to themselves. That's one of the reasons it's said that pirates are successful: they produce a better quality product.
Besides, what's easier to do: upgrade your entire organization with a new image for the same hardware platform buying new licenses for each PC, or keep the functioning licenses and image?
There's a lot of creative reasons why Windows still looks like Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 and does so in a nicely inconsistent manner, but they all add up to "it would have been really hard to change that, so we had to make sacrifices and do other stuff." All the answers from the blog team are fluff and excuses, saying they didn't have the time or the resources to get it done and that other things were more important. After five years. After $20 billion spent in R&D. After $5 billion spent just on Vista. With 40,000 employees world-wide. With $38 billion in the bank. So there are windows with a single tab that can't be resized that have text boxes too small to fit their text.
But they fixed up Minesweeper, so it's clear they're honest about being busy.
Malicious software can disable the Security Center. Malicious software like, net stop wscsvc or Active Directory (Security Center is disabled when joined to a domain).
Don't kid yourself: this article isn't about Microsoft not playing fair, it's about Symantec and McAfee and a bunch of other companies with a lot of money balanced entirely on the notion that Windows is insecure and untrustworthy collectively crapping their pants at the idea that people might figure out their software is cheap makeup on a dirty whore.
RAID-1 costs even more money than RAID-5. RAID-5 is n-1, RAID-1 is n/2.
There is the consideration of size, weight, and durability with drives that you don't have with tapes. If you drop a tape, big deal. If you drop a drive, goodbye drive.
Speed's already been covered. We're talking about data they don't even keep on nearline storage. It's on VHS (reading/writing speed: 1x) and DVD. A single tape (that holds 186 DVDs) on a shelf is a much better solution for this situation than three hard drives (140 DVDs) always on requiring administration and power. RAID is overkill on every level for this business.
And yes, 300 GB is the sweet spot for SCSI drives these days. This would be enterprise level data storage for a business, not your MP3s.
800 GB tape = $50 = 6 cents per GB
300 GB drive = $800 = $2.67 per GB
Disk space costs 44 times as much as tape space. That means they could make copies on 44 different tapes and pay the same as they would for disk space. RAID setups are for high availability (and nerds' wet dreams). If the current setup is VHS and DVD, I don't think they're looking for immediate fail-over redundancy and high speed I/O.
No, Vienna is the codename for the ultimate successor to Vista with a release called Fiji in between the two; Longhorn Server is the server version of Vista that will be released well after Vista.
Does no one remember how to get to Google any more?
Finally... fuck sensible? How can I argue with that.
You also have this naive idea that without civilization we're just sitting ducks waiting to be picked off. Humans and their direct ancestors have survived for over three million years. Modern humans have existed for the last two-hundred fifty thousand years. During that time there have been some pretty shitty days too, like the ice age whose remnants we're currently shaking off. Civilization is fragile. Humankind isn't.
You make a reasonable point about a lethal environment but fail to acknowledge my point that that same environment will work on Earth.
You fail to make any kind of reasonable point with "you want to wait until we are" running out of resources. The resources that really matter--oxygen, water, other life, materials that have already been refined--exist on Earth. Not Mars.
I'm not sure I even understand your third point. Mars is better than Earth because we'd have to make it and understand it? I see it that Earth is better than Mars because you don't have to understand it for life to survive. That's a lot of work already done when it comes to the survival game. You then contradict yourself by saying we're really bad at ecological engineering (so that's why we should place our bets on it?).
Interesting? Not really. With the resources on Earth and the fact that life will survive here even through catastrophic events, Mars is not the place to be. Mars kills life; Earth fosters it.
Comments like this always blow my mind. It makes my brain throb like I just drank a milkshake. No one ever stops to hear themselves actually speak them and so apparently don't realize how mind-numbingly dumb they are (the words, not the people). I'm talking, of course, about this line:
"Mars--the backup planet, the backup plan."
Mars is one of the least hospitable and most difficult to reach places you could hope to find. Sure, Mars is probably the Club Med of all the other planets and satellites in the solar system but to believe truly that it is a sensible safe place to escape is nonsense. The least hospitable places on Earth are still way, way less lethal than Mars. That's right--lethal. Mars is not kind to even microbial life. We've come up with a lot of creative ways to peek around Mars looking for signs of it and the best we've found is the possibility that it was there but died a really, really long time ago. That's a nice big "No Trespassing" sign. Violators are killed on sight.
Contrast with Earth, on whose worst day life still flourished. Believe it or not, there have been some pretty shitty days down here, like the Cambrian-Ordovician extinction, the Ordovician-Silurian extinction, the Permian-Triassic extinction (80+% extinction in a million years, not bad), our favorite the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction, and our own Holocene extinction. When the shit goes down on Earth it is still far, far more habitable than any extra-terrestrial location. Animal life requires other life if it wants to survive. Starting from scratch on a lifeless planet is much harder (and strikes me as much less sensible) than sticking around where life has clung with tenacity for the last 3.5 billion years.
The exception to this would be a planetary catastrophe that left no room for doubt that Earth would be less habitable than Mars is now--that would result in the total loss of liquid water, the burn up of all atmospheric oxygen, the loss of the Earth's magnetic field, the death and extinction of all life (from microbes on up), and the tipping point of sunlight being blocked from reaching the ground. Following this it would have to be more difficult to use resources available to eke out survival on Earth than it would be to use resources to reach another planet and start anew there.
One point that's often brought up is that if we start now we can have people living sustainably on Mars who could carry on without the need for Earth, thus preserving our human legacy. I'm of the belief that when we are sufficiently technologically advanced to achieve such a result that a planet-wide catastrophe will be easily weathered right here using that same technology.
It's like the guy saying string theory is eating up valuable resources that could be used elsewhere and everyone else saying it's too fun to give up. Dreams of colonizing Mars and living out our Ray Bradbury fantasies are too fun to give up, but don't bandy about the idea that it's anything remotely serious. At least string theory has some sensible math to back it up; there's little that's sensible about martian life as the human-kind "backup plan."
Owning slaves was inexcusable and if they truly believed it was wrong then their legacy is tainted with hypocrisy. I know slavery is wrong, but if I were to make a great deal of money from owning one would it be considered acceptable to continue the practice? I would be no more excused for it than they should be.
Regardless of the manner in which that information is presented, stating such furthers our own knowledge and understanding and should be lauded, not derided or hidden (as you imply it should be, in that it "cheapen"s their legacy).
In the context of their world-view, the founding fathers did do well and succeeded in many of their goals. In the context of our world-view they failed to meet the expectations we have of calling a country free and the people equal. In the context of a future world-view I'm sure the people will believe that we have failed to meet their expectations of what it means to be free and have equality (through at least three hotly debated issues, homosexuality, abortion and immigration).
Contextually the criticism levied against the founding fathers is completely warranted, appropriate, and expected from a modern American. Whatever their goals, however noble their intentions, however good their hearts, the founding fathers did construct the supreme law of the land to allow slavery, deny women the right to vote, and a host of other things we find distasteful and it is the right thing to do to acknowledge those shortcomings and acknowledge that the people of modern eras have tried to bring greater peace and freedom to their country.
Your claim that women were not specifically barred from voting by the constitution is correct but misleading. The 14th and 15th amendments explicitly give the right to vote to men and explicitly do not forbid gender discrimination. The constitution is implicitly saying that denying suffrage for women is legal and acceptable and that there is no constitutional argument that would provide them with those rights, despite the very clear opportunity to prevent such discrimination and division. When it comes to the fine language of the law, what you don't say is as important as what you do.
I agree with your first remark; if they're getting glowing reviews then that doesn't qualify as "Totally Sucks." But I stand by my original statement, which is that they haven't been known for that. They've had their chipsets out for a while now without much to show for it. nForce is still winning that battle.
I kind of have to agree with your second one too, in that getting Intel's blessing is usually a pretty good sign. But even if with some value they won't necessarily crank anything out worth buying or anything that might do better than nForce.
Anecdotally, almost all my experiences with ATI have been terrible when it comes to driver support and I don't have a lot of faith in them when it comes to doing right by their consumers beyond the six month period following purchase (or at all for non-Windows users). Intel is evil because of their G series chipsets. Their integrated graphics have been the source of headaches for the last nine years. ATI and Intel is like having a giant douche serve you a turd sandwich. Being served a free meal is usually nice, but you have to really consider all the factors, and I just don't see the two of them pulling through.