NWN2 is supposed to be like having your computer turn into a Dungeon Master, you really have to expect a lot of talking in a game like that. Personally I think it works quite well, although it does limit the replayability a bit since my patience will likely run a bit thin at sitting through the same story again.
Yeah, but are those LEDs going to cost $50 a bulb while the fancy new incandescent is less than $0.50 a bulb? LED bulbs are super cool, but also well outside of affordability envelope at the moment. I think LEDs are the future (until something better comes along at least), but right now they're just not practical.
Stop buying such crappy CFLs. I bought a whole house full of the things when I bought my house (4 years ago) and I've only had to replace 1 of them thus far (and it was obviously defective).
My Mother-in-Law always leaves her lights on but never changes bulbs herself (she's not all right in the head), it used to be a common ritual when I visit her to replace half of the bulbs in her house. I finally got tired of it and brought a big pack of CFLs and replaced all of her bulbs. I haven't had to replace a single one of those CFLs yet, they've already lasted between two and three times as long as her other bulbs. As and added bonus I saved her a fair bit on her power bill.
From what I've seen the tags are more of a way for some people to put snarky (or, more often lame) one-word comments on articles that appear on the front page. In some ways I don't like it because it reminds me of Fark and their "boobies" or "humor" tags, but on another the tags are sometimes more interesting than the writeup itself so I can't dog them too much.
I don't think we'll see player keys revoked in the near future. It's a PR nightmare to have people who bought your player to suddenly find themselves on some shit list just because the manufacturer messed up. In a tight race like HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray it's suicide.
Yeah, and they flat out say on their website that they don't give out any free demos because people only tend to need their product once every couple of years.
IMHO, Partition Magic is way too expensive. The $60 price point means that most people likely pirate it. If it were $10 or $20 I know I would be a lot less reluctant to pay for it (I've just gone and backed up and remade drives instead of paying for it, even though Partition Magic would have been faster; when I'm putzing on my home machine I really don't want to spend $60 to save a half hour of work). The $60 wouldn't be so bad if it came with free upgrades (because unlike a lot of seldom used applications, the upgrades for Partition magic are actually fairly important, I in fact do have an old version that only works if you have DOS on the machine), but since it's basically $60 each time you use it I can't justify the cost.
The conclusions from that article seem to contradict some of the sources. For instance, they talk about how there is no infant mortality, but then link to the Google study that shows that yes, there is infant mortality (although it may not be as strong as some people think). Infant mortality is not one of the things I've had much trouble with though, so YMMV.
I've never seen the second drive die during a rebuild (although this is typically RAID1_0, not RAID5), but that may be more a factor of the drives tend to work very hard regardless, so the rebuild is not much different from their normal usage pattern.
Completely depends on your environment. Large tape changers (robots) are pretty much your only choice with big datacenters. For home use removable hard drives are often good enough, especially since most home users don't do offsite backups like they should. You can even used fixed hard drives for home use, depending on how much you value your data. DVD backups aren't worth it in my experiance, they're too finicky and streaming across multiple disks is a pain at best.
That was my thought too. $15/month is way too high for a single application, especially since a lot of people can get discounts (student, through work, etc...) on their copy of Office.
Guys, if you're doing regular backups and have a cold spare handy then RAID5 is typically more than enough. Two drive failures are exceedingly rare unless you have some sort of controller fault (and that will typically hit all of your drives anyway). Don't forget about the write penalty either, RAID 5 has a fairly stiff penalty, but RAID 6 is even worse. If you're talking about RAID5_0 or RAID6_0 you're almost certainly doing it wrong or planning for a day when you can't buy replacement hard drives (nuclear holocaust?).
To put it another way: What do you think your chances are of having a second drive failure in the few hours it takes you to replace the drive and rebuild it? Even if that does happen you just lose the data up until your last backup (a day at most).
Most professional installations I do are RAID1_0, because people are building the RAID array for the performance, not the cost. Since you're using crappy 80GB HDDs, I'm guessing you're going for cost, which makes it strange that you're thinking about a RAID6_0 solution at all (the controller alone won't be cheap for that). If you work the odds I think you'll find that it's just not worth it to build a RAID6_0, especially given the write penalty and complexity (complexity is your enemy with this, complexity means bugs, which can undermine your entire effort).
The first revision of the slimline had a lot of problem with the lasers though, which was a shame because Sony had finally started to get the laser quality problems under control with the v.7 fat PS2s and then made a huge step backwards with the first slimlines.
The maximum TTL on a TCP/IP packet is 256 (I'm pretty sure it's unsigned). Of course that means absolutely nothing in this context because the TTL is only decremented (by one) when your packet goes through a router (it's designed to reduce the damage caused by routing loops). That said, there are timeouts in the TCP 3 way handshake that make setting up a regular plain vanilla TCP connection with Mars impossible unless you can figure out a way to exceed the speed of light. That's why you have to switch to IPN on the long hop to Mars and run applications that don't care about 20 minutes worth of delay. The applications are really the hardest part, you either have to set up fancy proxies or specifically build your application to handle long delays.
What you can do and what is affordable to the general populace is not always the same thing, especially with LED bulbs. Granted, with time the costs should come down, but right now people who make LED bulbs charge an arm and a leg for them.
There are some areas where CFLs are just plain not appropriate however, like in Ovens and Refrigerators. That's why blanket bans on all Incandescent bulbs are not a good idea.
I looked into getting those LED based lights last year for Christmas. Not only were they grossly overpriced (red and green LED bulbs are nowhere near that expensive), but most places were sold out! They also had rather ugly designs sadly.
Compact Fluorescents don't use old fashioned ballasts so they don't oscillate at 60Hz. They use electronic ballasts that oscillate somewhere in the thousands of Hz.
Don't they operate on similar bands though? How hard would it be to build a dual-protocol receiver now that they're merged? I assume the reason it hasn't been done before is because neither company will license their stuff to anybody who builds a dual protocol box.
One thing that drives me crazy is when they say "this food was Genetically Modified, or GM", but then don't tell you what the modifications were! It's just this big umbrella of foods that had some sort of genetic alteration done (I think selective breeding gets a pass, but I'm not sure).
Who needs a hot spare in a home machine anyway? It's not like I need 5 9's reliability on my porn. Cold spares are perfectly fine.
Also, RAID6 has even worse performance overhead than RAID5, and for home users it's blatant overkill, especially since you're backing up the data nightly anyway.
You act as if the TV companies would be completely psychotic, history has shown that they have a large vested self interest in not alienating their viewers. I think a deregulated TV would be a lot like our current TV except with a bit more nudity at night, and even then they would be coy about it. They wouldn't be dropping snuff films in between Captain Kangaroo and the Teletubbies because the advertisers would pull out of both shows instantly and the parents would not let your kids watch your channel anymore. It would be suicide as a company and it's not going to happen.
Surprisingly, NASCAR has a rulebook that is apparently thicker than your leg, and it's something of a cottage industry to try to cheat. There are stories of people bringing their car to the weigh in with a helmet made out of lead, and then switching to their regular helmet for the race to save a few pounds on the car.
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NWN2 is supposed to be like having your computer turn into a Dungeon Master, you really have to expect a lot of talking in a game like that. Personally I think it works quite well, although it does limit the replayability a bit since my patience will likely run a bit thin at sitting through the same story again.
Yeah, but are those LEDs going to cost $50 a bulb while the fancy new incandescent is less than $0.50 a bulb? LED bulbs are super cool, but also well outside of affordability envelope at the moment. I think LEDs are the future (until something better comes along at least), but right now they're just not practical.
Stop buying such crappy CFLs. I bought a whole house full of the things when I bought my house (4 years ago) and I've only had to replace 1 of them thus far (and it was obviously defective).
My Mother-in-Law always leaves her lights on but never changes bulbs herself (she's not all right in the head), it used to be a common ritual when I visit her to replace half of the bulbs in her house. I finally got tired of it and brought a big pack of CFLs and replaced all of her bulbs. I haven't had to replace a single one of those CFLs yet, they've already lasted between two and three times as long as her other bulbs. As and added bonus I saved her a fair bit on her power bill.
From what I've seen the tags are more of a way for some people to put snarky (or, more often lame) one-word comments on articles that appear on the front page. In some ways I don't like it because it reminds me of Fark and their "boobies" or "humor" tags, but on another the tags are sometimes more interesting than the writeup itself so I can't dog them too much.
I don't think we'll see player keys revoked in the near future. It's a PR nightmare to have people who bought your player to suddenly find themselves on some shit list just because the manufacturer messed up. In a tight race like HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray it's suicide.
Yeah, and they flat out say on their website that they don't give out any free demos because people only tend to need their product once every couple of years.
IMHO, Partition Magic is way too expensive. The $60 price point means that most people likely pirate it. If it were $10 or $20 I know I would be a lot less reluctant to pay for it (I've just gone and backed up and remade drives instead of paying for it, even though Partition Magic would have been faster; when I'm putzing on my home machine I really don't want to spend $60 to save a half hour of work). The $60 wouldn't be so bad if it came with free upgrades (because unlike a lot of seldom used applications, the upgrades for Partition magic are actually fairly important, I in fact do have an old version that only works if you have DOS on the machine), but since it's basically $60 each time you use it I can't justify the cost.
The conclusions from that article seem to contradict some of the sources. For instance, they talk about how there is no infant mortality, but then link to the Google study that shows that yes, there is infant mortality (although it may not be as strong as some people think). Infant mortality is not one of the things I've had much trouble with though, so YMMV.
I've never seen the second drive die during a rebuild (although this is typically RAID1_0, not RAID5), but that may be more a factor of the drives tend to work very hard regardless, so the rebuild is not much different from their normal usage pattern.
Completely depends on your environment. Large tape changers (robots) are pretty much your only choice with big datacenters. For home use removable hard drives are often good enough, especially since most home users don't do offsite backups like they should. You can even used fixed hard drives for home use, depending on how much you value your data. DVD backups aren't worth it in my experiance, they're too finicky and streaming across multiple disks is a pain at best.
That was my thought too. $15/month is way too high for a single application, especially since a lot of people can get discounts (student, through work, etc...) on their copy of Office.
Guys, if you're doing regular backups and have a cold spare handy then RAID5 is typically more than enough. Two drive failures are exceedingly rare unless you have some sort of controller fault (and that will typically hit all of your drives anyway). Don't forget about the write penalty either, RAID 5 has a fairly stiff penalty, but RAID 6 is even worse. If you're talking about RAID5_0 or RAID6_0 you're almost certainly doing it wrong or planning for a day when you can't buy replacement hard drives (nuclear holocaust?).
To put it another way: What do you think your chances are of having a second drive failure in the few hours it takes you to replace the drive and rebuild it? Even if that does happen you just lose the data up until your last backup (a day at most).
Most professional installations I do are RAID1_0, because people are building the RAID array for the performance, not the cost. Since you're using crappy 80GB HDDs, I'm guessing you're going for cost, which makes it strange that you're thinking about a RAID6_0 solution at all (the controller alone won't be cheap for that). If you work the odds I think you'll find that it's just not worth it to build a RAID6_0, especially given the write penalty and complexity (complexity is your enemy with this, complexity means bugs, which can undermine your entire effort).
The first revision of the slimline had a lot of problem with the lasers though, which was a shame because Sony had finally started to get the laser quality problems under control with the v.7 fat PS2s and then made a huge step backwards with the first slimlines.
The maximum TTL on a TCP/IP packet is 256 (I'm pretty sure it's unsigned). Of course that means absolutely nothing in this context because the TTL is only decremented (by one) when your packet goes through a router (it's designed to reduce the damage caused by routing loops). That said, there are timeouts in the TCP 3 way handshake that make setting up a regular plain vanilla TCP connection with Mars impossible unless you can figure out a way to exceed the speed of light. That's why you have to switch to IPN on the long hop to Mars and run applications that don't care about 20 minutes worth of delay. The applications are really the hardest part, you either have to set up fancy proxies or specifically build your application to handle long delays.
I'm guessing he plans to fill up the entire galaxy with 802.11 routers and use them for net connectivity.
What you can do and what is affordable to the general populace is not always the same thing, especially with LED bulbs. Granted, with time the costs should come down, but right now people who make LED bulbs charge an arm and a leg for them.
Dude, he's on iTunes, no need to pirate it.
There are some areas where CFLs are just plain not appropriate however, like in Ovens and Refrigerators. That's why blanket bans on all Incandescent bulbs are not a good idea.
I looked into getting those LED based lights last year for Christmas. Not only were they grossly overpriced (red and green LED bulbs are nowhere near that expensive), but most places were sold out! They also had rather ugly designs sadly.
Compact Fluorescents don't use old fashioned ballasts so they don't oscillate at 60Hz. They use electronic ballasts that oscillate somewhere in the thousands of Hz.
Don't they operate on similar bands though? How hard would it be to build a dual-protocol receiver now that they're merged? I assume the reason it hasn't been done before is because neither company will license their stuff to anybody who builds a dual protocol box.
I'm sorry, I just spit my coffee out across my screen.
One thing that drives me crazy is when they say "this food was Genetically Modified, or GM", but then don't tell you what the modifications were! It's just this big umbrella of foods that had some sort of genetic alteration done (I think selective breeding gets a pass, but I'm not sure).
Who needs a hot spare in a home machine anyway? It's not like I need 5 9's reliability on my porn. Cold spares are perfectly fine.
Also, RAID6 has even worse performance overhead than RAID5, and for home users it's blatant overkill, especially since you're backing up the data nightly anyway.
You act as if the TV companies would be completely psychotic, history has shown that they have a large vested self interest in not alienating their viewers. I think a deregulated TV would be a lot like our current TV except with a bit more nudity at night, and even then they would be coy about it. They wouldn't be dropping snuff films in between Captain Kangaroo and the Teletubbies because the advertisers would pull out of both shows instantly and the parents would not let your kids watch your channel anymore. It would be suicide as a company and it's not going to happen.
Surprisingly, NASCAR has a rulebook that is apparently thicker than your leg, and it's something of a cottage industry to try to cheat. There are stories of people bringing their car to the weigh in with a helmet made out of lead, and then switching to their regular helmet for the race to save a few pounds on the car.
I hated DRM before it was cool.