Three - three massive issues! Leakage, interference between that many components in one space, of course heat dissipation, and having a single, expensive, point of failure. Wait, I'll come in again.
You forgot the almost fanatical devotion to the Pope!
If they really wanted to catch pedophiles, they'd open everything up and track the hell out of who is downloading the child porn, then go arrest them. This ain't that, so that ain't what this is.
I think it's pretty obvious this is about trying to stem the tide of piracy. Most people downloading stuff from Usenet are likely not using a pay service, but the one included with their net access. Thus, shutting down access to the alt.* groups at the ISP level will block *most* of that kind of activity (along with all the legal stuff, too, of course).
From the same people who brought you the "Patriot" Act. If it's in the name, that ain't the game.:)
There used to be a Dutch radio program in the 80s called "NOS Hobbyscoop" that had their own basic interpreter for many computers of the day. (MSX, Acorn, Sharp MZ, etc.)
They actually broadcast computer programs every week on medium wave AM. They'd count down, you start the cassette recorder and you had some new programs.
Very interesting - that may be the first instance of P2P!
You two have no idea. Marketing wasn't Vista's downfall. Vista's downfall was crappy, completely laissez-faire design and management. I was there. I watched management let it completely rot on the vine. Really.
MS needs to can about 3/4 of its middle management if it ever hopes to actually compete with modern companies again as far as being able to put out a decent product in a reasonable timeframe. It's not the early 90s anymore.
And that's the cure! We simply change the gravitational constant of the universe, make javascript = java (for large values of 'javascript'), and all will be well. You just wait and see...
We had no problem finding junior devs with those skills, but finding people with PhDs and 20 years of experience in Silverlight and AJAX proved problematic for the senior positions.
How about a drive that advertises longevity instead of storage density. Seriously, I'd take half that storage if there was more assurance of my data integrity.
What you want is an SSD, then, though they're not available in even half this capacity as yet (wait a year or two, though). With wear-leveling, a modern SSD, from what I've read, tends to fail on a write attempt, leaving it still capable of being read (depending on what the filesystem does on a write failure). Thus, as an SSD gets older, instead of dying entirely like a spinning disk, it simply loses excess capacity, leaving the data already written available to be read (again, depending on filesystem behaviour).
My only concern with this is security - disposing of old SSDs with sensitive data on them, if they can't be erased (because they can't be written to), may be problematic. While a filesystem may mark those off as unwritable, and perhaps even unreadable, to the OS, a data recovery tool would certainly be capable of being created to read those old unwritable data cells with data still in them.
With SSDs being silicon transistor based and subject to Moore's Law, the density of these things should double roughly every 18 months or so (if not sooner since the industry is running hot and heavy right now). Already 256GiB models are being announced (maybe more; I haven't been paying attention that closely due to the costs of the higher capacity models), so a 750GiB model (half your 1.5'TB' requirement) shouldn't be too far out - probably 18-24 months at most.
OCZ's recent announcement of their Core SATA II SSD line with VERY reasonable prices (something like $170 or $180 for a 32GiB model, and going up to 128GiB) bodes quite well for the price dropping like a rock on these things in the very near future (much faster than I had been expecting, really).
The concerns over the SLC vs MLC debate will work themselves out soon, I'm sure. I'd really like OCZ to come out with ATA models of these things to retrofit an older laptop (like my ThinkPad T40) to bring new life to older machines. For now, I'll pop one in my old Mac Mini and hook it up to a NAS for big storage.
External 'one-touch' harddrives. Simply get the 1.5TB version of this one in the external form factor, et voila. It's not that hard.
Make sure you connect via eSATA, not something stupid like USB, which would take forEVER. It's easy to get a bracket to bring one of those unused internal SATA ports to the back of your machine, assuming your machine doesn't already have an eSATA port. FireWire 800 (IEEE1394.b) is the next fastest, then FW400, then USB. Not sure where Gigabit ethernet falls in this comparison, what with efficiency & latency issues.
What the market wants is for their 32GB drives to come down in price under the 100$ mark.
OCZ just announced their 'Core' series of SSDs, and the 32GiB part is supposed to retail for around $170 or $180, I think (though I can't yet find them for under $209 (yet - these were just announced), so we're pretty close.
For me, this will be a great upgrade for my old Mac Mini (Core Duo generation), which will attach to a NAS for main storage. If they had these in ATA versions, it would be a fantastic upgrade for my old ThinkPad T40, as I certainly don't need anything more than 32GiB in my laptop (though I know some people do). Sadly, they are only available in SATA versions.:(
Don't forget Peeps, which is my favorite Westerfeld.
Indeed, Peeps was great, but I was a bit disappointed in the sequel. I think Peeps would make a great movie, if handled correctly.
re: your link to Boing Boing
Gads, I can't believe I forgot Varley's 'Thunder' books. Great stuff that I just read within the last year.
I also like the Lt. Leary books by David Drake. A much less serious and less technical version of Weber's Honor Harrington books, I suppose you could describe them as.
I know I'm forgetting a lot more, but it's been a long day, and I'm going home now. *yawn*
Pierce's fantasy books are great reads, and not just for girls (or children). Probably a really good idea for boys to read to get the girl's perspective. Hopefully they won't be TOO much of a pain in the ass afterwards. Her 'The Cirle Opens' and 'The Circle of Magic' books, her Alanna books, her 'Immortals' books, 'Protector of the Small' books, are all great reads.
What's wrong with books that aren't sci-fi or fantasy?
What are you doing on Slashdot?:)
Just kidding. I actually started to deliberately expand my reading spheres about 12 years ago, and found I loved Tom Clancy and Robert B. Parker, as well as other things. The more I tried of the 'classic' stuff (Hemingway, etc.), the more I found it was really not for me. But at least I tried.
Don't forget RAH's first - Rocketship Galileo, and also Space Cadet, Time for the Stars. Also: I think 'The Rolling Stones' is the correct title of 'Space Family Stone', although I understand many of his early works were originally published serially, and under different titles; that may be the case here, but the novel has always been known to me as 'The Rolling Stones.' I would also include 'The Moon is a Harsh Mistress' and 'Starship Troopers' here, and perhaps 'The Puppet Masters.' I read all of these before I hit 12, and had no problems with them. Indeed, Moon is perhaps my favourite book to this day, even though I don't agree with some of Heinlein's social or some of his political views, it certainly formed or firmed a lot of my beliefs then and since. I don't see any need to avoid political stuff simply due to being young. On the contrary, much like with pets, it's good to get exposure early, else you might develop an allergy later in life.:)
Other good ones include Isaac Asimov's "Lucky Starr" books (originally credited to his alter ego, 'Paul French', I think). There are also Schmitz's "Telzey Amberdon" books, as well as his classic "The Witches of Karres." Clarke's "Islands in the Sky", Gallun's "The Planet Strappers" (hard to find, but awesome), "Across a Billion Years" by Silverberg, "Space Angel" by John Maddox Roberts, "Healer" by F. Paul Wilson, "Eridahn" by Robert Young (dinosaurs! Time travel! Martians! Aliens! (yes, Martians and Aliens are listed separately here:)), someone else already mentioned "Welcome to Mars" by Blish, and I'll certainly second that. There's a LOT more to E.E. Doc Smith than his Lensman and Skylark books, and I think I'd recommend them all. "Spacial Delivery" by Gordon Dickson was a good one, as are "Talking to Dragons" by Patricia Wrede, (which is apparently part of a series. This is the only one that I've read, and it stands alone brilliantly), the Harper Hall trilogy by Anne McCaffrey (set on the Pern world), and the undersea books by Jerry Pournelle (I think) I remember as being quite fun, too. Also: Robert Aspirin's "MythAdventures" books, and Piers Anthony's "Xanth" books (though the older you are, the more you'll get the 'awful' puns).
Many, if not most, of these, will need to be purchased used, due to the sad state of the publishing industry. *sigh*
I actually wrote a gigantic list on this subject several years ago on Slashdot - you may be able to find it via a search by using some of the more unique titles or names listed here as keywords.
Slashdot Mirror
The processor has NO MOVING PARTS!!! You bet your sweet bippie that this is more better circuitry. Finally - a solid-state microprocessor!
What a load of BS - there are quite a few electrons moving around in there. That will wear it out eventually, I'm sure.
Three - three massive issues! Leakage, interference between that many components in one space, of course heat dissipation, and having a single, expensive, point of failure. Wait, I'll come in again.
You forgot the almost fanatical devotion to the Pope!
If they really wanted to catch pedophiles, they'd open everything up and track the hell out of who is downloading the child porn, then go arrest them. This ain't that, so that ain't what this is.
I think it's pretty obvious this is about trying to stem the tide of piracy. Most people downloading stuff from Usenet are likely not using a pay service, but the one included with their net access. Thus, shutting down access to the alt.* groups at the ISP level will block *most* of that kind of activity (along with all the legal stuff, too, of course).
From the same people who brought you the "Patriot" Act. If it's in the name, that ain't the game. :)
The "hackers" used in the article are a red herring.
By the book, Mr RT:
Regulation Forty-six-A: "If transmissions are being monitored during battle..."
"...no uncoded messages on an open channel..."
"Red Herring" is actually a code phrase meaning there's an upgrade available for Firefox.
Then again, it could mean you don't get the shrubbery until you cut down the largest tree in the forest.
One of those two, I'm sure of it.
"Now *that's* what I call *pod-racing*!"
Now all we need is some Sand People to shoot at the racers, and we're all set!
>> The 131 page proposal
> That's a hell of a lot of napkins...
Hardly. That's like two visits to Taco Bell.
There used to be a Dutch radio program in the 80s called "NOS Hobbyscoop" that had their own basic interpreter for many computers of the day. (MSX, Acorn, Sharp MZ, etc.)
They actually broadcast computer programs every week on medium wave AM. They'd count down, you start the cassette recorder and you had some new programs.
Very interesting - that may be the first instance of P2P!
You go in straight through Falken's Maze.
And then after you get in, simply type 'OVERRIDE'.
Losers.
EGA mode
Well, what with most screens being widescreens now, that would have to be 'WEGA' mode.
You two have no idea. Marketing wasn't Vista's downfall. Vista's downfall was crappy, completely laissez-faire design and management. I was there. I watched management let it completely rot on the vine. Really.
MS needs to can about 3/4 of its middle management if it ever hopes to actually compete with modern companies again as far as being able to put out a decent product in a reasonable timeframe. It's not the early 90s anymore.
>>> What other features would you suggest to Microsoft if they are to have a hope for recovery?
>> A Linux kernel.
> And a pony. ...with wings!
They call it a flaw, while I call it a backdoor.
"Jim, you're giving away all our best tricks!"
Huh? Javascript != Java!!!!
And that's the cure! We simply change the gravitational constant of the universe, make javascript = java (for large values of 'javascript'), and all will be well. You just wait and see...
...demonstrate how you can make a 1GW fusion reactor out of nothing but a sweaty gym sock and the corpse of a field mouse.
Hmm...African or European field mouse?
We had no problem finding junior devs with those skills, but finding people with PhDs and 20 years of experience in Silverlight and AJAX proved problematic for the senior positions.
How about a drive that advertises longevity instead of storage density. Seriously, I'd take half that storage if there was more assurance of my data integrity.
What you want is an SSD, then, though they're not available in even half this capacity as yet (wait a year or two, though). With wear-leveling, a modern SSD, from what I've read, tends to fail on a write attempt, leaving it still capable of being read (depending on what the filesystem does on a write failure). Thus, as an SSD gets older, instead of dying entirely like a spinning disk, it simply loses excess capacity, leaving the data already written available to be read (again, depending on filesystem behaviour).
My only concern with this is security - disposing of old SSDs with sensitive data on them, if they can't be erased (because they can't be written to), may be problematic. While a filesystem may mark those off as unwritable, and perhaps even unreadable, to the OS, a data recovery tool would certainly be capable of being created to read those old unwritable data cells with data still in them.
With SSDs being silicon transistor based and subject to Moore's Law, the density of these things should double roughly every 18 months or so (if not sooner since the industry is running hot and heavy right now). Already 256GiB models are being announced (maybe more; I haven't been paying attention that closely due to the costs of the higher capacity models), so a 750GiB model (half your 1.5'TB' requirement) shouldn't be too far out - probably 18-24 months at most.
OCZ's recent announcement of their Core SATA II SSD line with VERY reasonable prices (something like $170 or $180 for a 32GiB model, and going up to 128GiB) bodes quite well for the price dropping like a rock on these things in the very near future (much faster than I had been expecting, really).
The concerns over the SLC vs MLC debate will work themselves out soon, I'm sure. I'd really like OCZ to come out with ATA models of these things to retrofit an older laptop (like my ThinkPad T40) to bring new life to older machines. For now, I'll pop one in my old Mac Mini and hook it up to a NAS for big storage.
Yay for the future!
And what backup solutions exist for 1.5TBs today?
External 'one-touch' harddrives. Simply get the 1.5TB version of this one in the external form factor, et voila. It's not that hard.
Make sure you connect via eSATA, not something stupid like USB, which would take forEVER. It's easy to get a bracket to bring one of those unused internal SATA ports to the back of your machine, assuming your machine doesn't already have an eSATA port. FireWire 800 (IEEE1394.b) is the next fastest, then FW400, then USB. Not sure where Gigabit ethernet falls in this comparison, what with efficiency & latency issues.
What the market wants is for their 32GB drives to come down in price under the 100$ mark.
OCZ just announced their 'Core' series of SSDs, and the 32GiB part is supposed to retail for around $170 or $180, I think (though I can't yet find them for under $209 (yet - these were just announced), so we're pretty close.
For me, this will be a great upgrade for my old Mac Mini (Core Duo generation), which will attach to a NAS for main storage. If they had these in ATA versions, it would be a fantastic upgrade for my old ThinkPad T40, as I certainly don't need anything more than 32GiB in my laptop (though I know some people do). Sadly, they are only available in SATA versions. :(
Typography != Calligraphy
Don't forget Peeps, which is my favorite Westerfeld.
Indeed, Peeps was great, but I was a bit disappointed in the sequel. I think Peeps would make a great movie, if handled correctly.
re: your link to Boing Boing
Gads, I can't believe I forgot Varley's 'Thunder' books. Great stuff that I just read within the last year.
I also like the Lt. Leary books by David Drake. A much less serious and less technical version of Weber's Honor Harrington books, I suppose you could describe them as.
I know I'm forgetting a lot more, but it's been a long day, and I'm going home now. *yawn*
Pierce's fantasy books are great reads, and not just for girls (or children). Probably a really good idea for boys to read to get the girl's perspective. Hopefully they won't be TOO much of a pain in the ass afterwards. Her 'The Cirle Opens' and 'The Circle of Magic' books, her Alanna books, her 'Immortals' books, 'Protector of the Small' books, are all great reads.
I can't believe I forgot to mention Scott Westerfeld's "Uglies" series (Uglies, Pretties, Specials, Extras).
Fantastic stuff, and quite thought-provoking. I was surprised how well the quality held up - every one is better than the one before.
Also, Cory Doctorow's recent "Little Brother" is an absolute gem, and should be on every geek's gift list to everyone they know, kid or adult.
His Venus series was pretty good, too, and this reminds me of Lin Carter's books, as well.
What's wrong with books that aren't sci-fi or fantasy?
What are you doing on Slashdot? :)
Just kidding. I actually started to deliberately expand my reading spheres about 12 years ago, and found I loved Tom Clancy and Robert B. Parker, as well as other things. The more I tried of the 'classic' stuff (Hemingway, etc.), the more I found it was really not for me. But at least I tried.
Don't forget RAH's first - Rocketship Galileo, and also Space Cadet, Time for the Stars. Also: I think 'The Rolling Stones' is the correct title of 'Space Family Stone', although I understand many of his early works were originally published serially, and under different titles; that may be the case here, but the novel has always been known to me as 'The Rolling Stones.' I would also include 'The Moon is a Harsh Mistress' and 'Starship Troopers' here, and perhaps 'The Puppet Masters.' I read all of these before I hit 12, and had no problems with them. Indeed, Moon is perhaps my favourite book to this day, even though I don't agree with some of Heinlein's social or some of his political views, it certainly formed or firmed a lot of my beliefs then and since. I don't see any need to avoid political stuff simply due to being young. On the contrary, much like with pets, it's good to get exposure early, else you might develop an allergy later in life. :)
Other good ones include Isaac Asimov's "Lucky Starr" books (originally credited to his alter ego, 'Paul French', I think). There are also Schmitz's "Telzey Amberdon" books, as well as his classic "The Witches of Karres." Clarke's "Islands in the Sky", Gallun's "The Planet Strappers" (hard to find, but awesome), "Across a Billion Years" by Silverberg, "Space Angel" by John Maddox Roberts, "Healer" by F. Paul Wilson, "Eridahn" by Robert Young (dinosaurs! Time travel! Martians! Aliens! (yes, Martians and Aliens are listed separately here :)), someone else already mentioned "Welcome to Mars" by Blish, and I'll certainly second that. There's a LOT more to E.E. Doc Smith than his Lensman and Skylark books, and I think I'd recommend them all. "Spacial Delivery" by Gordon Dickson was a good one, as are "Talking to Dragons" by Patricia Wrede, (which is apparently part of a series. This is the only one that I've read, and it stands alone brilliantly), the Harper Hall trilogy by Anne McCaffrey (set on the Pern world), and the undersea books by Jerry Pournelle (I think) I remember as being quite fun, too. Also: Robert Aspirin's "MythAdventures" books, and Piers Anthony's "Xanth" books (though the older you are, the more you'll get the 'awful' puns).
Many, if not most, of these, will need to be purchased used, due to the sad state of the publishing industry. *sigh*
I actually wrote a gigantic list on this subject several years ago on Slashdot - you may be able to find it via a search by using some of the more unique titles or names listed here as keywords.