Yeah, this is pretty much exactly the opposite of what companies looking to replace http/ftp want.
You are wrong. If you have a central tracker, and anybody serving legit content would have one, you need no "search" function, just a link on a website.
Bittorrent is the most efficient way yet developed to transfer large files, especially if you're trying to minimize your upload bandwith. Already, many video content sites and most file download sites have switched to Bittorent to save on beefy bandwidth costs. In the not-too-distant future I suspect it will be very difficult to download anything over 500 MB from commercial sites not using Bittorrent.
Clearly for general P2P tasks Bittorent needs a search engine, but that certainly shouldn't prevent commercial use of Bittorrent now (and it isn't).
They could go for hashes, but they would have to have a hash of every file they wanted to protect (not too difficult) and then break into the download stream to intercept the download traffic, completely download the file, re-hash it and then block that specific file for that specific user. The bandwidth, CPU, common sense, restrictions would make this impossible.
What they're doing is filenames. If you search for "Britney Spears" in your P2P window and it comes up with a list of files, if you try to download any of those files (legit or not) you'll get a pop-up browser window that will take to you a site to buy Britney Spears music (never mind that you might have been searching for a video, or a theme).
This simply won't work. Most P2P is encrypted, so they're not going to be able to decrypt the packets in realtime to get the searches. P2P protocols change so often and are so poorly documented that architecting an MitM attack against the unencrypted PROTOCOL would be dicey. And even if they did, that doesn't allow them to run arbitrary actions on the user's PC unless they install some sort of troyjan, and even then it may not work.
First, as I pointed out, Microsoft crippled the Novell client over and over, even before directory services.
How, magic? The NDS client worked just fine on NT4 when all it did was shim the login. Bugs started to be introduced in 2000 when Novell started trying to integrate with Active Directory. You can find dozens of apps that replace the login in Windows. Nobody else seemed to run into these problems.
Second, I enver thought of the NT security model as 'fine-grained'.
Relative to what? With NT4, you can set the permissions on individual files and processes for individual users. 2000 adds GPO. The Novell model was somewhat similar, but it only covered network shares. With NT4 and eventually AD you could do the whole operating system. And managing ACLs with command-line tools sucks to the point that it's basically impossible. This is the reason nobody used them in Netware (and the reason why nobody in Linux uses them now).
So good that if Microsoft told you that pixing the problem you were having meant removing Zen, you could, and it was undetectable.
I have no idea what this means.
Several times, Microsoft published specs that were false, and at least twice made changes intended to cause the Novell client to fail.
I can't find any details of this ruling, and it contradicts my own experience.
And then there's the little thing about NT and 2000 just not working well at all in multiprotocol networking.
Which protocols? Microsoft's support of IPX/SPX sucked almost as bad as Novell's support of TCP/IP, so I'll call 'em even. I'll agree that 2000 really doesn't like anything but TCP/IP.
Sorry, but you're pretty much in the tank.
Novell had a pretty good product in the Netware 3 and 4 days but they stood still while Microsoft, and eventually Linux, moved forward. Novell admits this themselves.
Well, you're wrong. The OP was 100% exactly correct.
Before even Novell had NDS working well there was StreeTalk. But NDS worked just fine, than, you very much. It was the client, being crippled by Microsoft, that hampered NetWare. Not NDS.
So MS somehow prevented Novell from using the fine-grained permissions of the NT security model? And somehow forced them to use IPX? NDS gave you a single-sign-on and that's it.
The whole Microsoft v. Novell thing is a good case study in using interoperability to first build a market, then crush your competition, leaving you dominant and solitary. Perhaps you need to go back and read some of the court papers to more fully appreciate the effort Microsoft put into making Novell fail on Windows.
Bullshit whining. The court case revolves around Microsoft supposedly "stealing" the idea of a directory system from Novell, which is bullshit. Novell didn't invent directory systems and if you think they did, why aren't you bitching about LDAP violating Novell's IP?
Between 1996 and 2000 Microsoft made a better product than NDS, Active Directory. Adoption of Active Directory was not instantaneous, nor was the abandonment of NDS. The reality is that Novell did nothing to improve their product against the competition of Active Directory and so customers moved on.
I deal with a lot of companies, in particular Fortune 1000 companies, and every single one of them is using Active Directory, many are using it for all clients Windows, MacOS, and Linux. A few (3) are using Lotus Notes. As a group, they're not impressed with alternate solutions.
How about 250 GB of data? That's the size of entry-level HDs nowadays. Burn it to 15 DVDs?
Actually, that's not a bad idea.
It's a terrible idea. For one, I miscounted. It would take about 30 DVD-9s or 60 DVD-Rs. That's a backup process that takes a bare minimum of 240 minutes of constant disc swapping. And the DVD-9s cost at least $1 each, so that's a minimum of $30. NOBODY is going to do this every week.
I mean...everyone has a safe deposit box, right? I make a trip to the bank at least once a week to drop something in my safe deposit box.
Certainly not. I don't have one. I don't think that most people do, and even if they did I seriously doubt they'd be willing to shuffle backup tapes out of their safe deposit boxes every week (another 4 hour ordeal), or an external hard drive for that matter.
But an external hard drive placed in a safe deposit box is the only reasonable suggestion you've made thus far. I still think online backup is vastly superior because it's much more likely to see actual USE and be up to date.
I've got about 100 GB of data that is actually important, which gets backed up about once a week to DVD and stuffed in a safe deposit box. I've got another 200 GB or so of data that isn't really important, but I'd rather not lose it (save games, movies, music, etc.) - which gets backed up to DVD every couple months.
You're obsessive, at least relative to 99% of home users. I would never do crap like this, I don't have the free time.
I've been playing with the idea of buying myself a tape drive.
In my opinion, it's a waste of money for pretty much everyone. $1000 buys you a lot of hard drives for a lot of redundancy. Make 'em external if you want. Still vastly faster and MORE RELIABLE (tape drives fail constantly, the MTBF is less than a year IME) to use more hard drives. Robotic tape arrays are typically the LEAST robust equipment in a datacenter.
I suggest you ask a marine biologist about the pollution of the Irish Sea by British Nuclear Fuels.
Trivial nonsense. Look how much ocean pollution is caused by oil!
If you had any idea how poorly handled nuclear WEAPONS are and how few accidents we've had despite that poor handling I suspect you'd have a much rosier view of nuclear power.
And the way you uncritically regurgitate the talking points of their PR marks you as not so smart at best
Wind, solar, and tidal do not cut it. They all generate energy in the kilowatt range and we need megawatts. They are fundamentally too diffuse energy sources to meet our needs. Solar shows some promise if they can manage to make solar cells far more efficent than they are now (right now they're at 30%, we need 90%.) Geothermal works pretty well, but has a similar problem to hydroelectric in that the suitable sites are very limited. Basically Iceland and the South Pacific. "Biofuels" are complete snake oil that show similar promise to cold fusion. Not helpful.
As a planet we face exactly three choices:
1) Mass use of oil/coal/natural gas. 2) Mass use of nuclear power. 3) Mass death by starvation, disease, etc.
I strongly believe that 2) is the best of these options. The tiny handful of deaths in a massively expanded nuclear power industry would be nothing next to the millions, or possible BILLIONS, of deaths cause by trying to force people to adopt unworkable technologies.
You prove to me that you have a system that can generate as much energy as nuclear with less pollution and we can talk about it. As far as I'm aware, it doesn't exist, and I've personally worked with many alternative power systems (solar, wind, biofuels).
I'm on good terms with a number of physicists and every last one of them is a strong nuclear power advocate, as is just about every other well-educated person I know.
As long as the human factor is not addressed, we will end up with nuclear power stations run by the same sort of companies, with the same sort of MBAs leading them, that pushed for financial deregulation. Do you really think that is a good idea?
I want us to stop using coal and oil as much as possible. That means either nuclear or mass starvation, and I don't find mass starvation attractive.
No, I'm constantly playing a game for 10 months* (when I started WoW)
You're still constantly playing a 4 year old game. There are lots of other MMOs out there if you're stuck to that genre.
My point was, that underneath EVERY console game is one of 3 types: War, Driving, and Sports. What people call RPGs on consoles isn't really RPG, it's just the War model with some basic stats added. For real RPG players, console RPGs are very much RPG-lite, aimed at first timers.
So where do Civilization Revolutions, Guitar Hero, and Portal fit into these "genres"?
There is no such thing as a "War" game. That's not an accepted video game genre, sorry. You're probably talking about First Person Shooters and Third Person Shooters. Neither are console RPGs.
How many recent console RPGs have you played anyway? You seem to be frightfully ignorant. What does a Japanese-style strategy RPG like Spectral Force 3 have to do with FPS or 3PS games? According to you, Eternal Sonata, which I've been playing for a while now, is a "War" game.
MMORPGs are multiplayer grinding, single player RPGs are single-player griding. That's basically the difference. If anything, there tends to be less grinding in single-player games. Single-player PC RPGs have controls as sophisticated, or usually more sophisticated, than MMORPGs. The Witcher is a good example.
On top of that, this is the worst page-view whore site I have ever seen. The "article" is spread across 10 pages, wrapped in frames and absolutely slathered with advertising. The site designer should be shot.
Also, it has to be said, can a console REALLY provide the complex interface that makes most MMOs so involving ?
No.
You've hit upon THE reason MMOs haven't seen wide adoption on consoles. Look at THE only remaining console MMO, Final Fantasy XI. The PS2/360 interface is basically broken. The only other console MMO, Phantasy Star Online, was very action-oriented and popular mainly because of novelty (it launched on the Dreamcast, and was the first online console game widely available).
Console gaming is in a rut, which is why my 360 gathers dust while I slaughter Elementals in WoW for hours on end.)
You're constantly replaying a 4 year old game and you're saying console gaming is in a rut?
While to some extent MMOs are cash cows (essentially charging people $20 a month to do the same grinding they do for $50 flat offline), at their best they allow players to become invested in the virtual world through buying property, running large multi-user encounters, and affecting an overarching storyline (as in single-player games).
Many people game with their Real Life friends online, where the social aspect is more appealing than the relative isolation of single-player. Most so-called "single player" RPGs are incorporating multiplayer elements, recent examples include Too Human and Fable II.
Um, wrong. Think about it, if the engine is working for all 3 races (and it would have to be for multiplayer) then all they have to do left is the campaigns, which is just a bunch of voicework and scripted events. All of the real work in RTS games is in the engine, and that's done.
No, this is about charging $180 for a $60 game. If they release the Protoss and Zerg campaigns for $10 or even $20 I'd say you're right, but they won't. They're greedy over at Blizzard. They're too used to World of Warcraft money.
How do you figure? The better mini with the larger hard drive and keyboard/mouse is $950. The iMac is $1200. That's $250 for the screen (and a bit higher clock) from where I'm looking.
Minis are built using cast-off components from the laptop lines. iMacs are actual desktops with actual desktop components. Perversely, you're paying a premium for the laptop components in the mini even though it's marketed as a desktop. And anyway, you're still paying $250. Nearly double the cost of an equivalent stand-alone monitor.
First off, I have a hard time seeing a home user coming up with 12 TB of data anytime soon.
How about 250 GB of data? That's the size of entry-level HDs nowadays. Burn it to 15 DVDs?
Next up, a RAID (1, 5, 10, various combinations there-of) does not protect you from the single biggest threat to your data - user error.
The extra size and speed granted by a RAID 5 or 10 array would make it easier to use undelete software on top of Windows. I know this from personal experience.
But you're basically right, all RAID does is protect you from hard drive failure. Not your house catching on fire or your desktop getting stolen.
You could dump it to a NAS and then unplug the thing and stick it in a safe deposit box. Or you can print everything out and mail it to your uncle. Or you can burn a pile of DVDs and hide them throughout the woods. But unless you've got your data offsite it is not protected.
None of these stupid suggestions are online, so they're useless. For home users, the ONLY realistic offsite backup solution in online backup over the internet. And it's expensive and time-consuming for large amounts of data.
If you've got more data you could get yourself an external HDD, or a few USB flash drives, or a cheap NAS and dump the data to it.
Backing up to an external HDD or NAS is backuing up hard disks with other hard disks at the same location. I fail to see how this is significant different from RAID (except slower).
RAID + as much internet backup as you can afford is THE solution for home users.
Does anyone have any hard numbers on this? The last numbers I've heard from the best systems under ideal conditions was around 65% accuracy. Picking faces out of the crowd was essentially impossible.
Not FACT, false. I've never had any device scratch a disc. Not the PS1, not the PS2, not the PS3. I have a copy of FFVII purchased in 1997 without a single scratch on it, that I could put in this PS3 right now, boot back to GameOS and play.
Let's see photographs. I'm serious. I do not believe you.
I used to work for SCEA. I've seen hundreds of Playstations and thousands of game discs. I've never seen a game disc that was played in a Playstation that didn't have a scratch. Not once. Ever. We would put brand new game discs straight out of the package and put them into original Playstations, boot the Playstation and the game to the start screen and then shut down the Playstation. And the disc would have a radial scratch caused by the lifter.
Every single time an original Playstation, PSOne, Dreamcast, PSTwo, etc. spins up a CD it scratches it. This is an artifact of the "flip-top" design. EVERY flip-top CD/DVD player will scratch discs. Technically, EVERY CD player scratches discs, though caddy drives will almost never scratch your discs and very nice slot-loaders are pretty gentle on your discs. Hard core audiophiles rip CDs using DVD-RAM drives for this reason. The order, from worst to best is:
Flip-top Tray-loading Slot-loading Caddy
For this reason the best current console in terms of "not scratching your discs" is the PS3 (the slot drive on the wii is a little wonky). The drive in the PS3 is one of the best disc drives available in general. This is vital for the PS3 as small scratches can destroy huge swaths of data on Blu-Ray discs.
Windscale was over 50 years ago and nobody was killed or seriously injured. Ditto for Japan. Nothing like the Windscale or Chernobyl accident could happen in a modern reactor.
When thousands of people per year die in the nuclear power industry I'll call it "unsafe". As the number is currently less that 1 per year, I think we're good. Wind and hydroelectric have worse safety records. I think the only system that beats nuclear is geothermal, and that's due to the tiny number of plants.
It's much harder to direct streams of air in an open case.
Putting all the components in open air negates the "streams of air" issue because the cold air is everywhere around the case. The paranoid could set up a box fan and point it at the case and have pretty much the same effect as ducting. With this case you start worrying about a cool ROOM.
As I said, give me a link to a better air-cooled case. Trust me, it doesn't exist.
There are tower cases with the disk cage swiveling out for easy access,
With the Antec case you just hook them onto the side. Way fewer steps than anything else I've seen.
individual disks mounted on rapid-mounting slide rails, and expansion cards locked in place with levers - no need to push on them to insert,
I hate rails, and especially those level locks on expansion cards. I have never seen a case where these things weren't implemented as cheap plastic crap that broke constantly. You also lose rails, especially if you're switching components often. You end up having to use just as many screws and having another part to break.
I'm absolutely sure such a specialized case could be made much better than that, especially more compact and accessible.
You may be be right, I just haven't seen it. This Antec case is the easiest-access case I've ever seen, beating only loose components on the desk for cooling and ease of access.
And the sliding motherboard tray in this contraption looks like a complete misunderstanding - it slides out to the back and the card support frame doesn't move with it. Guessing from the photos, you'd need to take out all the expansion cards to actually slide the motherboard out to access it comfortably.
This was mentioned in the review: The one catch is the plastic card retention bar--if your graphics card is fairly small, you can slide it in sideways and plug it in without removing the bar. Otherwise, you'll be unscrewing that bar every time you want to pull the tray out.
So if you anticipate pulling the motherboard out a lot, you simply unscrew the clear plastic card retainer and let your cards flop around. I would do this anyway (see my aforementioned hatred of cheap plastic crap). I would definitely prefer a metal retention bar here, but it's easy to unscrew so I could probably live with it.
Does that mean kids should be allowed to sneak into theaters or into concerts?
Absolutely yes. All of the musicians I know want kids who have no money to sneak into concerts to encourage their love of music so that when they DO have money they'll choose to spend it music and concerts.
But what do artists know? They just make the music.
My PlayStation (original) games have DRM, have worked for over a decade and I have no reason to expect they won't continue to work for as long as my hardware holds out.
The original Playstation scratched games discs as they were played. You play any game long enough on the original Playstation, the disc will end up scratched to the point of unreadability. This is true of ALL CDs and ALL CD and CD-ROM drives, the Playstation (and all flip-top CD drives) was just particularly bad in this regard. Most copies of Final Fantasy VII out there have at least one bad disc, for this reason. This is one of the reasons why I I tell people to buy refurbished original PS2s instead of the disc-scratching flip-top PSTwos.
If your original games are all working you must not have played them very much. Or you're lying.
For dedicated gaming platforms (where you're never going to have the need to use the media on a different device) DRM is a good thing as a locked-down platform makes cheating drastically harder.
You can do code signing without copy protection. Just check the file signature when the user goes online. Or you can do file level encryption of the executables and libraries. This approach is way easier, cheaper, and more reliable than copy protection. It's been working fine in PC games for years.
I gave up on PC gaming because of the cheaters.
People cheat on consoles too. Cheating is rampant on the XBOX 360 versions of Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4.
It's like with the latest iMac revision when they went to a junk-quality screen - Apple's always had high margins, but you used to get a great computer for your money.
iMacs have always been a lousy value proposition. Saving 2 cables (1 power and monitor) costs you $500-800 when you buy a iMac. The built-in displays have ALWAYS been inferior to inexpensive standaone displays. That was true at launch. The innovation of the iMac wasn't a cheap COMPUTER, it was a cheap APPLE COMPUTER. There were all-in-ones available for years (with better specs and cheaper) before the iMac was introduced. People weren't buying.
1) Your Product Managers are trying to turn the version number into a marketing point. 2) This is very deceitful because your Product Managers are trying to obfuscate the maturity level of the product. This is equivalent to printing "First released in 2001!" on the box.
So how you react depends on your ethics and how much you care about the company. If you care about ethics you should fight this because it makes YOU look like a liar. If you care about the company you should fight this because it's stupid and will harm the company's reputation. If you don't care about either of these things, let them call it whatever they want.
One suggestion would be to use an less dishonest version indicator in the product. Call it "x 2008" or "x Professional Edition". Or simply "x" and leave a version number off the product. This is common with 1.0 products.
FACT: DRM on games (PC, console, whatever) WILL slowly destroy the game discs and cause you to lose your investment in the game. DRM is a scam to cheat customers out of extra money for the games they buy.
The act of playing a disc scratches it. If you're required to leave the 1st disc in their drive all the time eventually it will become so scratched the game won't run anymore and the consumer will be out $50. And no, the publisher won't usually replace the disc for free. You'll, at best, have to pay a fee (at least $20 nowadays) to get the disc replaced. Most of the time the publisher will simply not respond.
This is the whole purpose of "backups". To protect your original disc against scratching. This was absolutely vital on the Playstation 1, which scratched the hell out of discs. Most older copies of Final Fantasy VII are completely unplayable for this reason.
I'm willing to say that the only reason almost ALL PC gamers don't use the cracks is because many are not aware of them. If the cracks sites were advertised on Gamespot, for example, and they were marketed as "game enhancements" not "cracks" I suspect you'd see a lot more people using them.
Because either 99.8% of gamers actually buy the games they play or 99.8% of gamers are confident in their russian software cracks websites.
Many gamers who buy PC games use the cracks because they actually want to INSTALL the game and don't want to leave a disc for that game sitting in their DVD drive. If you have more than one game installed in your PC this is a major nuisance. Even moreso if you're using a laptop.
They probably also care about the money they spent. The act of playing a disc scratches it. If they're required to leave the 1st disc in their drive all the time eventually it will become so scratched the game won't run anymore and the consumer will be out $50. And no, the manufacturer won't usually replace the disc for free. You'll, at best, have to pay a fee (at least $20 nowadays) to get the disc replaced.
FACT: DRM on games (PC, console, whatever) WILL slowly destroy the game discs and cause you to lose your investment in the game. DRM is a scam to cheat customers out of extra money for the games they buy.
I'm willing to say that the only reason almost ALL PC gamers don't use the cracks is because many are not aware of them. If the cracks sites were advertised on Gamespot, for example, and they were marketed as "game enhancements" not "cracks" I suspect you'd see a lot more people using them.
Um, what? We've bought laptops from Lenovo, Toshiba, and HP recently and most of those have HDMI ports and the ones that don't have DVI. Those are the biggest laptop sellers in North America, so I don't know what you're smoking. HDMI ports are common on desktop video cards as well, though many manufacturers are just shipping DVI to HDMI converters in the box (it's the exact same protocol, just different connectors).
No, they're not. As long as they're reaching their sales goals, their price is less than or equal to what it could be. For having such a high opinion of yourself and your financial habits, you suck at economics.
You cut out the relevant part of his post:
Their service isn't worth the premium.
Exactly right. My experiences with Apple product support have been no better than the product support from other major laptop manufacturers, and notably worse than IBM (I think Lenovo has inferior support) and Alienware.
Sales figures are not normally used as measure of product value. If that were true then Budweiser would be the best beer ever and Baywatch the best TV show ever produced.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, this is pretty much exactly the opposite of what companies looking to replace http/ftp want.
You are wrong. If you have a central tracker, and anybody serving legit content would have one, you need no "search" function, just a link on a website.
Bittorrent is the most efficient way yet developed to transfer large files, especially if you're trying to minimize your upload bandwith. Already, many video content sites and most file download sites have switched to Bittorent to save on beefy bandwidth costs. In the not-too-distant future I suspect it will be very difficult to download anything over 500 MB from commercial sites not using Bittorrent.
Clearly for general P2P tasks Bittorent needs a search engine, but that certainly shouldn't prevent commercial use of Bittorrent now (and it isn't).
There is no way this could possibly work.
They could go for hashes, but they would have to have a hash of every file they wanted to protect (not too difficult) and then break into the download stream to intercept the download traffic, completely download the file, re-hash it and then block that specific file for that specific user. The bandwidth, CPU, common sense, restrictions would make this impossible.
What they're doing is filenames. If you search for "Britney Spears" in your P2P window and it comes up with a list of files, if you try to download any of those files (legit or not) you'll get a pop-up browser window that will take to you a site to buy Britney Spears music (never mind that you might have been searching for a video, or a theme).
This simply won't work. Most P2P is encrypted, so they're not going to be able to decrypt the packets in realtime to get the searches. P2P protocols change so often and are so poorly documented that architecting an MitM attack against the unencrypted PROTOCOL would be dicey. And even if they did, that doesn't allow them to run arbitrary actions on the user's PC unless they install some sort of troyjan, and even then it may not work.
First, as I pointed out, Microsoft crippled the Novell client over and over, even before directory services.
How, magic? The NDS client worked just fine on NT4 when all it did was shim the login. Bugs started to be introduced in 2000 when Novell started trying to integrate with Active Directory. You can find dozens of apps that replace the login in Windows. Nobody else seemed to run into these problems.
Second, I enver thought of the NT security model as 'fine-grained'.
Relative to what? With NT4, you can set the permissions on individual files and processes for individual users. 2000 adds GPO. The Novell model was somewhat similar, but it only covered network shares. With NT4 and eventually AD you could do the whole operating system. And managing ACLs with command-line tools sucks to the point that it's basically impossible. This is the reason nobody used them in Netware (and the reason why nobody in Linux uses them now).
So good that if Microsoft told you that pixing the problem you were having meant removing Zen, you could, and it was undetectable.
I have no idea what this means.
Several times, Microsoft published specs that were false, and at least twice made changes intended to cause the Novell client to fail.
I can't find any details of this ruling, and it contradicts my own experience.
And then there's the little thing about NT and 2000 just not working well at all in multiprotocol networking.
Which protocols? Microsoft's support of IPX/SPX sucked almost as bad as Novell's support of TCP/IP, so I'll call 'em even. I'll agree that 2000 really doesn't like anything but TCP/IP.
Sorry, but you're pretty much in the tank.
Novell had a pretty good product in the Netware 3 and 4 days but they stood still while Microsoft, and eventually Linux, moved forward. Novell admits this themselves.
I disagree.
Well, you're wrong. The OP was 100% exactly correct.
Before even Novell had NDS working well there was StreeTalk. But NDS worked just fine, than, you very much.
It was the client, being crippled by Microsoft, that hampered NetWare. Not NDS.
So MS somehow prevented Novell from using the fine-grained permissions of the NT security model? And somehow forced them to use IPX? NDS gave you a single-sign-on and that's it.
The whole Microsoft v. Novell thing is a good case study in using interoperability to first build a market, then crush your competition, leaving you dominant and solitary. Perhaps you need to go back and read some of the court papers to more fully appreciate the effort Microsoft put into making Novell fail on Windows.
Bullshit whining. The court case revolves around Microsoft supposedly "stealing" the idea of a directory system from Novell, which is bullshit. Novell didn't invent directory systems and if you think they did, why aren't you bitching about LDAP violating Novell's IP?
Between 1996 and 2000 Microsoft made a better product than NDS, Active Directory. Adoption of Active Directory was not instantaneous, nor was the abandonment of NDS. The reality is that Novell did nothing to improve their product against the competition of Active Directory and so customers moved on.
I deal with a lot of companies, in particular Fortune 1000 companies, and every single one of them is using Active Directory, many are using it for all clients Windows, MacOS, and Linux. A few (3) are using Lotus Notes. As a group, they're not impressed with alternate solutions.
How about 250 GB of data? That's the size of entry-level HDs nowadays. Burn it to 15 DVDs?
Actually, that's not a bad idea.
It's a terrible idea. For one, I miscounted. It would take about 30 DVD-9s or 60 DVD-Rs. That's a backup process that takes a bare minimum of 240 minutes of constant disc swapping. And the DVD-9s cost at least $1 each, so that's a minimum of $30. NOBODY is going to do this every week.
I mean...everyone has a safe deposit box, right? I make a trip to the bank at least once a week to drop something in my safe deposit box.
Certainly not. I don't have one. I don't think that most people do, and even if they did I seriously doubt they'd be willing to shuffle backup tapes out of their safe deposit boxes every week (another 4 hour ordeal), or an external hard drive for that matter.
But an external hard drive placed in a safe deposit box is the only reasonable suggestion you've made thus far. I still think online backup is vastly superior because it's much more likely to see actual USE and be up to date.
I've got about 100 GB of data that is actually important, which gets backed up about once a week to DVD and stuffed in a safe deposit box. I've got another 200 GB or so of data that isn't really important, but I'd rather not lose it (save games, movies, music, etc.) - which gets backed up to DVD every couple months.
You're obsessive, at least relative to 99% of home users. I would never do crap like this, I don't have the free time.
I've been playing with the idea of buying myself a tape drive.
In my opinion, it's a waste of money for pretty much everyone. $1000 buys you a lot of hard drives for a lot of redundancy. Make 'em external if you want. Still vastly faster and MORE RELIABLE (tape drives fail constantly, the MTBF is less than a year IME) to use more hard drives. Robotic tape arrays are typically the LEAST robust equipment in a datacenter.
I suggest you ask a marine biologist about the pollution of the Irish Sea by British Nuclear Fuels.
Trivial nonsense. Look how much ocean pollution is caused by oil!
If you had any idea how poorly handled nuclear WEAPONS are and how few accidents we've had despite that poor handling I suspect you'd have a much rosier view of nuclear power.
And the way you uncritically regurgitate the talking points of their PR marks you as not so
smart at best
Wind, solar, and tidal do not cut it. They all generate energy in the kilowatt range and we need megawatts. They are fundamentally too diffuse energy sources to meet our needs. Solar shows some promise if they can manage to make solar cells far more efficent than they are now (right now they're at 30%, we need 90%.) Geothermal works pretty well, but has a similar problem to hydroelectric in that the suitable sites are very limited. Basically Iceland and the South Pacific. "Biofuels" are complete snake oil that show similar promise to cold fusion. Not helpful.
As a planet we face exactly three choices:
1) Mass use of oil/coal/natural gas.
2) Mass use of nuclear power.
3) Mass death by starvation, disease, etc.
I strongly believe that 2) is the best of these options. The tiny handful of deaths in a massively expanded nuclear power industry would be nothing next to the millions, or possible BILLIONS, of deaths cause by trying to force people to adopt unworkable technologies.
You prove to me that you have a system that can generate as much energy as nuclear with less pollution and we can talk about it. As far as I'm aware, it doesn't exist, and I've personally worked with many alternative power systems (solar, wind, biofuels).
I'm on good terms with a number of physicists and every last one of them is a strong nuclear power advocate, as is just about every other well-educated person I know.
As long as the human factor is not addressed, we will end up with nuclear power stations run by the same sort of companies, with the same sort of MBAs leading them, that pushed for financial deregulation. Do you really think that is a good idea?
I want us to stop using coal and oil as much as possible. That means either nuclear or mass starvation, and I don't find mass starvation attractive.
No, I'm constantly playing a game for 10 months* (when I started WoW)
You're still constantly playing a 4 year old game. There are lots of other MMOs out there if you're stuck to that genre.
My point was, that underneath EVERY console game is one of 3 types: War, Driving, and Sports. What people call RPGs on consoles isn't really RPG, it's just the War model with some basic stats added. For real RPG players, console RPGs are very much RPG-lite, aimed at first timers.
So where do Civilization Revolutions, Guitar Hero, and Portal fit into these "genres"?
There is no such thing as a "War" game. That's not an accepted video game genre, sorry. You're probably talking about First Person Shooters and Third Person Shooters. Neither are console RPGs.
How many recent console RPGs have you played anyway? You seem to be frightfully ignorant. What does a Japanese-style strategy RPG like Spectral Force 3 have to do with FPS or 3PS games? According to you, Eternal Sonata, which I've been playing for a while now, is a "War" game.
MMORPGs are multiplayer grinding, single player RPGs are single-player griding. That's basically the difference. If anything, there tends to be less grinding in single-player games. Single-player PC RPGs have controls as sophisticated, or usually more sophisticated, than MMORPGs. The Witcher is a good example.
A virtually identical article on this case was posted 2 weeks ago.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/13/2015222
On top of that, this is the worst page-view whore site I have ever seen. The "article" is spread across 10 pages, wrapped in frames and absolutely slathered with advertising. The site designer should be shot.
Also, it has to be said, can a console REALLY provide the complex interface that makes most MMOs so involving ?
No.
You've hit upon THE reason MMOs haven't seen wide adoption on consoles. Look at THE only remaining console MMO, Final Fantasy XI. The PS2/360 interface is basically broken. The only other console MMO, Phantasy Star Online, was very action-oriented and popular mainly because of novelty (it launched on the Dreamcast, and was the first online console game widely available).
Console gaming is in a rut, which is why my 360 gathers dust while I slaughter Elementals in WoW for hours on end.)
You're constantly replaying a 4 year old game and you're saying console gaming is in a rut?
While to some extent MMOs are cash cows (essentially charging people $20 a month to do the same grinding they do for $50 flat offline), at their best they allow players to become invested in the virtual world through buying property, running large multi-user encounters, and affecting an overarching storyline (as in single-player games).
Many people game with their Real Life friends online, where the social aspect is more appealing than the relative isolation of single-player. Most so-called "single player" RPGs are incorporating multiplayer elements, recent examples include Too Human and Fable II.
Um, wrong. Think about it, if the engine is working for all 3 races (and it would have to be for multiplayer) then all they have to do left is the campaigns, which is just a bunch of voicework and scripted events. All of the real work in RTS games is in the engine, and that's done.
No, this is about charging $180 for a $60 game. If they release the Protoss and Zerg campaigns for $10 or even $20 I'd say you're right, but they won't. They're greedy over at Blizzard. They're too used to World of Warcraft money.
How do you figure? The better mini with the larger hard drive and keyboard/mouse is $950. The iMac is $1200. That's $250 for the screen (and a bit higher clock) from where I'm looking.
Minis are built using cast-off components from the laptop lines. iMacs are actual desktops with actual desktop components. Perversely, you're paying a premium for the laptop components in the mini even though it's marketed as a desktop. And anyway, you're still paying $250. Nearly double the cost of an equivalent stand-alone monitor.
First off, I have a hard time seeing a home user coming up with 12 TB of data anytime soon.
How about 250 GB of data? That's the size of entry-level HDs nowadays. Burn it to 15 DVDs?
Next up, a RAID (1, 5, 10, various combinations there-of) does not protect you from the single biggest threat to your data - user error.
The extra size and speed granted by a RAID 5 or 10 array would make it easier to use undelete software on top of Windows. I know this from personal experience.
But you're basically right, all RAID does is protect you from hard drive failure. Not your house catching on fire or your desktop getting stolen.
You could dump it to a NAS and then unplug the thing and stick it in a safe deposit box. Or you can print everything out and mail it to your uncle. Or you can burn a pile of DVDs and hide them throughout the woods. But unless you've got your data offsite it is not protected.
None of these stupid suggestions are online, so they're useless. For home users, the ONLY realistic offsite backup solution in online backup over the internet. And it's expensive and time-consuming for large amounts of data.
If you've got more data you could get yourself an external HDD, or a few USB flash drives, or a cheap NAS and dump the data to it.
Backing up to an external HDD or NAS is backuing up hard disks with other hard disks at the same location. I fail to see how this is significant different from RAID (except slower).
RAID + as much internet backup as you can afford is THE solution for home users.
Does anyone have any hard numbers on this? The last numbers I've heard from the best systems under ideal conditions was around 65% accuracy. Picking faces out of the crowd was essentially impossible.
Does anyone have anything that contradicts this?
Not FACT, false. I've never had any device scratch a disc. Not the PS1, not the PS2, not the PS3. I have a copy of FFVII purchased in 1997 without a single scratch on it, that I could put in this PS3 right now, boot back to GameOS and play.
Let's see photographs. I'm serious. I do not believe you.
I used to work for SCEA. I've seen hundreds of Playstations and thousands of game discs. I've never seen a game disc that was played in a Playstation that didn't have a scratch. Not once. Ever. We would put brand new game discs straight out of the package and put them into original Playstations, boot the Playstation and the game to the start screen and then shut down the Playstation. And the disc would have a radial scratch caused by the lifter.
Every single time an original Playstation, PSOne, Dreamcast, PSTwo, etc. spins up a CD it scratches it. This is an artifact of the "flip-top" design. EVERY flip-top CD/DVD player will scratch discs. Technically, EVERY CD player scratches discs, though caddy drives will almost never scratch your discs and very nice slot-loaders are pretty gentle on your discs. Hard core audiophiles rip CDs using DVD-RAM drives for this reason. The order, from worst to best is:
Flip-top
Tray-loading
Slot-loading
Caddy
For this reason the best current console in terms of "not scratching your discs" is the PS3 (the slot drive on the wii is a little wonky). The drive in the PS3 is one of the best disc drives available in general. This is vital for the PS3 as small scratches can destroy huge swaths of data on Blu-Ray discs.
Windscale was over 50 years ago and nobody was killed or seriously injured. Ditto for Japan. Nothing like the Windscale or Chernobyl accident could happen in a modern reactor.
When thousands of people per year die in the nuclear power industry I'll call it "unsafe". As the number is currently less that 1 per year, I think we're good. Wind and hydroelectric have worse safety records. I think the only system that beats nuclear is geothermal, and that's due to the tiny number of plants.
It's much harder to direct streams of air in an open case.
Putting all the components in open air negates the "streams of air" issue because the cold air is everywhere around the case. The paranoid could set up a box fan and point it at the case and have pretty much the same effect as ducting. With this case you start worrying about a cool ROOM.
As I said, give me a link to a better air-cooled case. Trust me, it doesn't exist.
There are tower cases with the disk cage swiveling out for easy access,
With the Antec case you just hook them onto the side. Way fewer steps than anything else I've seen.
individual disks mounted on rapid-mounting slide rails, and expansion cards locked in place with levers - no need to push on them to insert,
I hate rails, and especially those level locks on expansion cards. I have never seen a case where these things weren't implemented as cheap plastic crap that broke constantly. You also lose rails, especially if you're switching components often. You end up having to use just as many screws and having another part to break.
I'm absolutely sure such a specialized case could be made much better than that, especially more compact and accessible.
You may be be right, I just haven't seen it. This Antec case is the easiest-access case I've ever seen, beating only loose components on the desk for cooling and ease of access.
And the sliding motherboard tray in this contraption looks like a complete misunderstanding - it slides out to the back and the card support frame doesn't move with it. Guessing from the photos, you'd need to take out all the expansion cards to actually slide the motherboard out to access it comfortably.
This was mentioned in the review: The one catch is the plastic card retention bar--if your graphics card is fairly small, you can slide it in sideways and plug it in without removing the bar. Otherwise, you'll be unscrewing that bar every time you want to pull the tray out.
So if you anticipate pulling the motherboard out a lot, you simply unscrew the clear plastic card retainer and let your cards flop around. I would do this anyway (see my aforementioned hatred of cheap plastic crap). I would definitely prefer a metal retention bar here, but it's easy to unscrew so I could probably live with it.
Does that mean kids should be allowed to sneak into theaters or into concerts?
Absolutely yes. All of the musicians I know want kids who have no money to sneak into concerts to encourage their love of music so that when they DO have money they'll choose to spend it music and concerts.
But what do artists know? They just make the music.
My PlayStation (original) games have DRM, have worked for over a decade and I have no reason to expect they won't continue to work for as long as my hardware holds out.
The original Playstation scratched games discs as they were played. You play any game long enough on the original Playstation, the disc will end up scratched to the point of unreadability. This is true of ALL CDs and ALL CD and CD-ROM drives, the Playstation (and all flip-top CD drives) was just particularly bad in this regard. Most copies of Final Fantasy VII out there have at least one bad disc, for this reason. This is one of the reasons why I I tell people to buy refurbished original PS2s instead of the disc-scratching flip-top PSTwos.
If your original games are all working you must not have played them very much. Or you're lying.
For dedicated gaming platforms (where you're never going to have the need to use the media on a different device) DRM is a good thing as a locked-down platform makes cheating drastically harder.
You can do code signing without copy protection. Just check the file signature when the user goes online. Or you can do file level encryption of the executables and libraries. This approach is way easier, cheaper, and more reliable than copy protection. It's been working fine in PC games for years.
I gave up on PC gaming because of the cheaters.
People cheat on consoles too. Cheating is rampant on the XBOX 360 versions of Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4.
It's like with the latest iMac revision when they went to a junk-quality screen - Apple's always had high margins, but you used to get a great computer for your money.
iMacs have always been a lousy value proposition. Saving 2 cables (1 power and monitor) costs you $500-800 when you buy a iMac. The built-in displays have ALWAYS been inferior to inexpensive standaone displays. That was true at launch. The innovation of the iMac wasn't a cheap COMPUTER, it was a cheap APPLE COMPUTER. There were all-in-ones available for years (with better specs and cheaper) before the iMac was introduced. People weren't buying.
As other posters pointed out:
1) Your Product Managers are trying to turn the version number into a marketing point.
2) This is very deceitful because your Product Managers are trying to obfuscate the maturity level of the product. This is equivalent to printing "First released in 2001!" on the box.
So how you react depends on your ethics and how much you care about the company. If you care about ethics you should fight this because it makes YOU look like a liar. If you care about the company you should fight this because it's stupid and will harm the company's reputation. If you don't care about either of these things, let them call it whatever they want.
One suggestion would be to use an less dishonest version indicator in the product. Call it "x 2008" or "x Professional Edition". Or simply "x" and leave a version number off the product. This is common with 1.0 products.
FACT: DRM on games (PC, console, whatever) WILL slowly destroy the game discs and cause you to lose your investment in the game. DRM is a scam to cheat customers out of extra money for the games they buy.
The act of playing a disc scratches it. If you're required to leave the 1st disc in their drive all the time eventually it will become so scratched the game won't run anymore and the consumer will be out $50. And no, the publisher won't usually replace the disc for free. You'll, at best, have to pay a fee (at least $20 nowadays) to get the disc replaced. Most of the time the publisher will simply not respond.
This is the whole purpose of "backups". To protect your original disc against scratching. This was absolutely vital on the Playstation 1, which scratched the hell out of discs. Most older copies of Final Fantasy VII are completely unplayable for this reason.
I'm willing to say that the only reason almost ALL PC gamers don't use the cracks is because many are not aware of them. If the cracks sites were advertised on Gamespot, for example, and they were marketed as "game enhancements" not "cracks" I suspect you'd see a lot more people using them.
Because either 99.8% of gamers actually buy the games they play or 99.8% of gamers are confident in their russian software cracks websites.
Many gamers who buy PC games use the cracks because they actually want to INSTALL the game and don't want to leave a disc for that game sitting in their DVD drive. If you have more than one game installed in your PC this is a major nuisance. Even moreso if you're using a laptop.
They probably also care about the money they spent. The act of playing a disc scratches it. If they're required to leave the 1st disc in their drive all the time eventually it will become so scratched the game won't run anymore and the consumer will be out $50. And no, the manufacturer won't usually replace the disc for free. You'll, at best, have to pay a fee (at least $20 nowadays) to get the disc replaced.
FACT: DRM on games (PC, console, whatever) WILL slowly destroy the game discs and cause you to lose your investment in the game. DRM is a scam to cheat customers out of extra money for the games they buy.
I'm willing to say that the only reason almost ALL PC gamers don't use the cracks is because many are not aware of them. If the cracks sites were advertised on Gamespot, for example, and they were marketed as "game enhancements" not "cracks" I suspect you'd see a lot more people using them.
Um, what? We've bought laptops from Lenovo, Toshiba, and HP recently and most of those have HDMI ports and the ones that don't have DVI. Those are the biggest laptop sellers in North America, so I don't know what you're smoking. HDMI ports are common on desktop video cards as well, though many manufacturers are just shipping DVI to HDMI converters in the box (it's the exact same protocol, just different connectors).
No, they're not. As long as they're reaching their sales goals, their price is less than or equal to what it could be. For having such a high opinion of yourself and your financial habits, you suck at economics.
You cut out the relevant part of his post:
Their service isn't worth the premium.
Exactly right. My experiences with Apple product support have been no better than the product support from other major laptop manufacturers, and notably worse than IBM (I think Lenovo has inferior support) and Alienware.
Sales figures are not normally used as measure of product value. If that were true then Budweiser would be the best beer ever and Baywatch the best TV show ever produced.