I lived in an urban apartment 25 miles away from downtown Chicago, and the best connection I could get was 14.4 dialup. No other options. I lived there for five years. If I still lived there, I still wouldn't have any faster access. I actually broke into the telco panel in the building to re-wire all three of my lines (which got me to 16.8 for a while) at one point.
Broadband access is not universal. 56k is not universal. 28.8k is not universal.
So it doesn't bother you to have lots of PCs on your network with identical SIDs?
If you're taking the step of imaging, use Sysprep (google it) to make each install clean and unique, or at the very least find a copy of GHSTWALK.exe to run after the fact.
1. Switch to a non-IE browser. Permanently. Install the IEView and IEtab extensions, Adblock Plus and the G.Filterset updater. 2. Use a service like meebo.com or aimexpress.com if you really feel you must IM someone. Uninstall local IM shit. I tell people to remove P2P software as well, because most people are idiots who can't tell the difference between "Britney Spears Naked.AVI" and "Britney Spears Naked.AVI.vbs", and why downloading either would be a bad idea. 3. Use the Windows XP SP2 firewall (many of my students have a hard time configuring anything else, which leads to more problems) 4. Install Mike's Ad Blocking Hosts file (blocks ads from some sites that install drive-by shit in IE) 5. Install and Update (monthly) SpywareBlaster. 6. Install and Update (weekly) Adaware and Spybot 7. Go in to Safe Mode to Run Scans (tap the F8 key to bring up the boot menu during startup, if you aren't a Windows person). I suggest running scans weekly until one is sure the problem is under control. Parents with kids might as well just stay in safe mode forever. 8. Back to normal mode. Spybot and Adaware will both probably require a second, startup scan to kill something that wormed its way into Windows. 9. Do a final check with a visit to Housecall.antivirus.com (which can remove spyware nowadays). I like to drop to Safe Mode with Networking for this, but it isn't possible for some people.
These steps will eliminate probably 90% of the spyware people run into.
If at this point, there's STILL something on the PC, the next step is Hijack This (run from Safe Mode, natch) - I explain to my students that there are some places where they can post their log files, but most of 'em just email it to me.
I'd say this gets rid of 97% of spyware.
Beyond that, you can run into shit that, for example, sets permissions on registry keys (something Hijack This can't deal with, and that I wouldn't want a non-tech to deal with anyway), loads a DLL attached to Windows explorer, loads as a device driver, or is seriously a rootkit. Sometimes a removal method exists for that stuff. Sometimes it doesn't.
I wrote in my profile that I consider a 40-minute episode of Firefly at least as valuable as a full-fare ticket to a movie, which would make a 22-episode season of new shows worth about $200 to me.
There are thousands of people like me out there. The signal will not be stopped.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Parent looks at dirty pictures at work all day. I worked 88 hours last week and had to wait until I got home every night to look at teh boobies.
To the OP: seriously, read the stupid Microsoft books, or as much of them as you can stand without puking. Don't bother with the tests until some tells you that it's a requirement that you certify. At that point, you tell them with a straight face that you want compensation for your study time. I say this as a Microsoft Certified Trainer. The stuff on those exams can be pretty out there, and unless you really WANT to be on a "Microsoft Certified" career track there are better things to do with your life.
I deal enough with hardware that fixing things that break isn't much of an issue for me. A NAS device breaks, I've got to RMA it or maybe I have a service contract on it. I'm down at least a day or two. A PC breaks, and I'll probably have it back up and running in 20 minutes. I can have parts on hand to deal with whatever is broken. Can you say that about your black box? Do you think waiting for someone to ship me a new device is a good use of time?
But can you add more RAM? Or replace your disk architecture? Or upgrade the network interface? I've seen the product in question. It didn't give me any particular warm fuzzies. I don't see any significant advantages of a semi-DYI NAS over just putting together an actual file server. I'll bet if I could even get power consumption and thermal output figures to be roughly the same.
1. Buy a large tower case. Or use an old one. Whatever. Make sure there are lots of 3.5" drive bays. 2. Put in some kind of crappy, low-heat motherboard and CPU. Use the Celeron 300A you bought back in 1998. Whatever. Pop in 128MB RAM or so. 3. Buy a large, name brand PSU. Enermax, Seasonic, PCP&P, something like that. 4. Put in some kind of crappy boot drive. The 10GB drive that probably went with the Celeron 300A will be fine. Load Linux or Windows Server. Whatever makes you happy (yes, Windows Server will run on 128MB, especially if it's not doing anything but serving files). 5. Install a multiport IDE or SATA controller. Sil, Promise, Via, whatever. They're all OK. You want to be able to handle at least four drives. I prefer SATA at this point, 'cause I like big drives. 6. Speaking of big drives, 250GB disks are dirt cheap. Buy four of those. I prefer Samsung and Hitachi drives. We're using spanned 250GB drives 'cause 500GB drives by themselves cost four times as much. 7. Configure some a nice spanned, mirrored volume (RAID10 or the like). Two copies of a 500GB volume will be just fine. I prefer to use software RAID, in case I have to move the disks to another machine that doesn't have the same controller, but if you have a hardware option for RAID10, more power to you. Remember that RAID mirroring doesn't protect you from your own stupidity and cheapo PCI disk controllers never do RAID volume management. 8. Or don't mirror, and just use the second volume as a backup destination for the first. 9. Stick the resulting PC in a closet someplace. Administer with VNC or SWAT or RDP or whatever makes you happy. Total cost for this project is probably $500 or $600, almost all due to the hard disks.
Alternatively, you could use an NSLU2 + a 500GB drive in a USB enclosure. That would also be a $500 setup, and there's no redundancy there.
There is a wonderful and beautiful thing made by Logitech, called a Harmony Remote Control. They seem very expensive (I think they start at about $75) at first, but unlike all the crappy "all in one" remotes you might've seen before, Harmony remotes really DO let you go from 7 remotes down to just one.
They attach to a PC with a USB cable, and rather than screwing around with a book of device codes, the Harmony software does an interview with you to find out what hardware you have and how you have it hooked up. When you get done, it saves that information on a user account at the harmony web site, in case your zapper gets broken or needs to be reprogrammed.
My mother couldn't do anything more than turn on TV or stick an tape in a VCR. She was scared of the collection of remotes that accumulated around my parents' TV. I got her a Harmony, which has a button that says "Watch TV". It turns on the TV, the receiver, and the satellite box, then sets the correct inputs for her and tunes the TV to "Animal Planet" for her.
At the future point where character design can be done with a sketchpad, the controlling agency will no longer be entirely responsible for the infinite possibilities that sketchpad offers. A cyclops-like visor, however, is one of a limited number of eyepieces (I think there are around 30) that a user might choose for their in-game avatar. Why is it even a choice, if it can be so strongly identified with a single character? Likewise claws: There's only one character in all of comics who has 3 claws coming out the back of his hand (infringement). There are dozens with animal-like claws on the ends of their fingers (not infringement).
On the flip side, there is no-zero-none reason for CoX's costume creator to offer costume pieces that are identical to those used by Marvel characters (e.g. A visor that looks like the one Cyclops wears). There's no reason for CoX's claws powers to resemble Wolverine's. If Marvel wants to complain that the creator lets you make a Big green guy with purple pants, that's a bit much. But anyone with a little common sense is going to say those claws look an awful lot like Wolverine's. Out of all the ways claws could've been done, the fact is someone deliberately chose the most potentially infringing way, and someone in a supervisory role at Cryptic obviously approved it. Marvel's case certainly DID have merit.
Please, please go play that, and help to take the anime influence out of CoX. It's hard enough trying to get a western Super-Hero flavor in City of Heroes when every third person who is logged in has character name based on Sailor Moon or La Blue Girl or whatever the fuck else has huge eyes, tentacles and snot bubbles.
The problem with Consumer reports is that the reports and reviews are not written by experts. They are written by consumers, who have no idea what the hell they're dealing with.
Consumer Reports "best buy" computer every year ends up being a Compaq or a Dell or an HP machine. Anyone who knows anything about computers will get a good chuckle out of their rationale for that rating.
I know a guy who has said much the same thing about their ratings of HVAC equipment.
I'd rather have the opinion of an expert than a purposefully ignorant "consumer".
Chicago Public Radio has a wonderful program called "World View" which does an amazing job of covering non-Middle-Eastern politics. I can't recall them talking about Tonga but I distinctly recall a discussion of Sealand not all that long ago.
Wow. ClearChannel and Infinity are bitching that they're becoming irrelevant.
Who cares? Public Radio (NPR in the US and the CBC in Canada, at least) are vibrant and entertaining.
I used to work for ABC Radio. I remember installing a device that removed "umm..." and "dead air" from the announcer's speech just so they could slide in an extra commercial or two over a one hour period. Everyone who bitches and moans about the 25 minutes of commercials per hour deserves the media conglomerates.
The problem with expecting the world to adopt and open chat protocol is... it won't be. IM is essentially the first communication standard that developed post "Black September" (in the days since AOL peered with the actual Internet and therefore the beginning of widespread internet commericialization). The big swinging dicks of the Internet all have too much at stake to ever allow anything so reasonable as a standard chat protocol to actually function across their networks, as long as their proprietary alternative exists.
The very fact that, 10 years later, Internet users do not yet have a usable, standard instant message program (well, there's ytalk or ntalk... used those lately? Or even heard of them?) suggests that commerical interests have impeded what should be the straightforward procedure of adopting workable standard, and the currrent, fractured state of IM clients among big internet companies leads to the unappealing morass that no-doubt bought the original poster to "Ask Slashdot".
E-mail, most of the time is functionally instant and it has been since at least the mid-90s; I managed two short e-mails back and forth between myself in Indiana and a product support rep for a computer hardware vendor in California earlier today, in under 10 minutes. That's certainly instant enough. Two days? Well, I (barely) remember UUCP. I'll bet a lot of Slashdotters don't.
At any rate, I don't use IM software. No one at my company uses IM software. From my observation, one or two sentence "chatty" comments that get sent with IM software can just as easily be e-mailed; one or two sentences of text certainly aren't the most "abusive" thing that might come through an SMTP server at any given moment. What's the increased functionality that IM gives, anyway?
I have said this before when the subject of IM software comes up: There is no such thing as good IM software. Everyone has a perfectly good, universal "instant message" protocol. It's called SMTP.
What's wrong with IM? Well, to talk to everyone you might want to talk to, you need multiple sign-ons for each of the incompatible networks. And you have to configure either a universal client that's going to be borked periodically by official protocol updates, or you have to load five or six "official" clients on your computer.
Plus you have to be willing to trust each company whose IM software you want to use. Is their software secure? Are their servers? How much information is leaked out your PC when you use their protocol? Will they give you a date with an advertising bot?
No thanks. E-mail is universal, not controlled by any single company and can easily be secured. What's not to love about that?
Windows Server 2003 Web Edition starts (to a login prompt) in 32 seconds on the 100GB, 4200rpm Hitachi drive in my Gateway A64/4000 1GB laptop. That's compares well with the startup time for Server 2003 on *desktop* machines I have, with much faster drives.
My other notebook, a 1GB 1.6GHz Pentium M Thinkpad T40 with an 80GB, 7200rpm Hitachi drive in it, actually starts Server 2003 Web edition about 12 seconds slower.
Yes, some apps start faster on the Thinkpad. Others, there's no perceptible difference, and the latter outweigh the former.
On Saturday, for no particular reason, I bought a $1300 Gateway Athlon64/4000 with 1GB RAM and an X600 graphics chip (roughly on-par with a Radeon 9700).
I tried out Farcry on it. It played FINE (granted, not on the highest detail settings). I sat in the passenger seat of a car and played with a trackball.
Later, I tried City of Villains on it. It played fine.
This thing isn't even a "gaming" laptop. An X600 is modest, not exceptional, graphics hardware, but it's good enough for something as modern as Farcry. I'd say mobile gaming is at least a possibility on new hardware.
The other thing is... most laptops (including my 3-day-old Gateway) still ship with 4200rpm drives. And, amazingly, the bit-density of large drives (80GB or 100GB or 120GB) is still good enough to keep up with the faster-spinning power-hungry 5400 and 7200rpm models; drives with high density platters read data in larger chunks regardless. When I look at the trade-off in battery life for going to a faster drive, I'd have to say I'm a little put off. Mostly I'm going to load Firefox and/or a word processor on that thing, and that's about it. Even with a 7200rpm drive, I'm not going to get a huge subjective improvement in performance.
I'm not teribly worried about having my stuff stolen. I have a ~4 month old set of tapes (borrowed the 5-tape drive from a customer) that would get me back on my feet if I ever had a catastrophy like a fire.
I have around 11TB of disk drives at home. You will too, within the timeframe of something like this becoming available. At that point, 300GB/disc will be just as worthless a 8.5GB DVD would be to you right now.
Besides, there's no indication that these discs will be available in a writeable format.
Anyway, a single-drive LTO and, say, four tapes would only set you back a couple grand. If your home data is important, it's not THAT bad.
Personally, I subdivide and mirror my data on a couple machines. That's good enough for my needs.
Slashdot Mirror
I lived in an urban apartment 25 miles away from downtown Chicago, and the best connection I could get was 14.4 dialup. No other options. I lived there for five years. If I still lived there, I still wouldn't have any faster access. I actually broke into the telco panel in the building to re-wire all three of my lines (which got me to 16.8 for a while) at one point.
Broadband access is not universal. 56k is not universal. 28.8k is not universal.
So it doesn't bother you to have lots of PCs on your network with identical SIDs?
If you're taking the step of imaging, use Sysprep (google it) to make each install clean and unique, or at the very least find a copy of GHSTWALK.exe to run after the fact.
1. Switch to a non-IE browser. Permanently. Install the IEView and IEtab extensions, Adblock Plus and the G.Filterset updater.
2. Use a service like meebo.com or aimexpress.com if you really feel you must IM someone. Uninstall local IM shit. I tell people to remove P2P software as well, because most people are idiots who can't tell the difference between "Britney Spears Naked.AVI" and "Britney Spears Naked.AVI.vbs", and why downloading either would be a bad idea.
3. Use the Windows XP SP2 firewall (many of my students have a hard time configuring anything else, which leads to more problems)
4. Install Mike's Ad Blocking Hosts file (blocks ads from some sites that install drive-by shit in IE)
5. Install and Update (monthly) SpywareBlaster.
6. Install and Update (weekly) Adaware and Spybot
7. Go in to Safe Mode to Run Scans (tap the F8 key to bring up the boot menu during startup, if you aren't a Windows person). I suggest running scans weekly until one is sure the problem is under control. Parents with kids might as well just stay in safe mode forever.
8. Back to normal mode. Spybot and Adaware will both probably require a second, startup scan to kill something that wormed its way into Windows.
9. Do a final check with a visit to Housecall.antivirus.com (which can remove spyware nowadays). I like to drop to Safe Mode with Networking for this, but it isn't possible for some people.
These steps will eliminate probably 90% of the spyware people run into.
If at this point, there's STILL something on the PC, the next step is Hijack This (run from Safe Mode, natch) - I explain to my students that there are some places where they can post their log files, but most of 'em just email it to me.
I'd say this gets rid of 97% of spyware.
Beyond that, you can run into shit that, for example, sets permissions on registry keys (something Hijack This can't deal with, and that I wouldn't want a non-tech to deal with anyway), loads a DLL attached to Windows explorer, loads as a device driver, or is seriously a rootkit. Sometimes a removal method exists for that stuff. Sometimes it doesn't.
I wrote in my profile that I consider a 40-minute episode of Firefly at least as valuable as a full-fare ticket to a movie, which would make a 22-episode season of new shows worth about $200 to me.
There are thousands of people like me out there. The signal will not be stopped.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Parent looks at dirty pictures at work all day.
I worked 88 hours last week and had to wait until I got home every night to look at teh boobies.
To the OP: seriously, read the stupid Microsoft books, or as much of them as you can stand without puking. Don't bother with the tests until some tells you that it's a requirement that you certify. At that point, you tell them with a straight face that you want compensation for your study time. I say this as a Microsoft Certified Trainer. The stuff on those exams can be pretty out there, and unless you really WANT to be on a "Microsoft Certified" career track there are better things to do with your life.
I deal enough with hardware that fixing things that break isn't much of an issue for me. A NAS device breaks, I've got to RMA it or maybe I have a service contract on it. I'm down at least a day or two. A PC breaks, and I'll probably have it back up and running in 20 minutes. I can have parts on hand to deal with whatever is broken. Can you say that about your black box? Do you think waiting for someone to ship me a new device is a good use of time?
But can you add more RAM? Or replace your disk architecture? Or upgrade the network interface?
I've seen the product in question. It didn't give me any particular warm fuzzies. I don't see any significant advantages of a semi-DYI NAS over just putting together an actual file server. I'll bet if I could even get power consumption and thermal output figures to be roughly the same.
And I think it's sane and reasonable to want something that can be upgraded or reconfigured. Funny how that works.
1. Buy a large tower case. Or use an old one. Whatever. Make sure there are lots of 3.5" drive bays.
2. Put in some kind of crappy, low-heat motherboard and CPU. Use the Celeron 300A you bought back in 1998. Whatever. Pop in 128MB RAM or so.
3. Buy a large, name brand PSU. Enermax, Seasonic, PCP&P, something like that.
4. Put in some kind of crappy boot drive. The 10GB drive that probably went with the Celeron 300A will be fine. Load Linux or Windows Server. Whatever makes you happy (yes, Windows Server will run on 128MB, especially if it's not doing anything but serving files).
5. Install a multiport IDE or SATA controller. Sil, Promise, Via, whatever. They're all OK. You want to be able to handle at least four drives. I prefer SATA at this point, 'cause I like big drives.
6. Speaking of big drives, 250GB disks are dirt cheap. Buy four of those. I prefer Samsung and Hitachi drives. We're using spanned 250GB drives 'cause 500GB drives by themselves cost four times as much.
7. Configure some a nice spanned, mirrored volume (RAID10 or the like). Two copies of a 500GB volume will be just fine. I prefer to use software RAID, in case I have to move the disks to another machine that doesn't have the same controller, but if you have a hardware option for RAID10, more power to you. Remember that RAID mirroring doesn't protect you from your own stupidity and cheapo PCI disk controllers never do RAID volume management.
8. Or don't mirror, and just use the second volume as a backup destination for the first.
9. Stick the resulting PC in a closet someplace. Administer with VNC or SWAT or RDP or whatever makes you happy.
Total cost for this project is probably $500 or $600, almost all due to the hard disks.
Alternatively, you could use an NSLU2 + a 500GB drive in a USB enclosure. That would also be a $500 setup, and there's no redundancy there.
There is a wonderful and beautiful thing made by Logitech, called a Harmony Remote Control. They seem very expensive (I think they start at about $75) at first, but unlike all the crappy "all in one" remotes you might've seen before, Harmony remotes really DO let you go from 7 remotes down to just one.
They attach to a PC with a USB cable, and rather than screwing around with a book of device codes, the Harmony software does an interview with you to find out what hardware you have and how you have it hooked up. When you get done, it saves that information on a user account at the harmony web site, in case your zapper gets broken or needs to be reprogrammed.
My mother couldn't do anything more than turn on TV or stick an tape in a VCR. She was scared of the collection of remotes that accumulated around my parents' TV. I got her a Harmony, which has a button that says "Watch TV". It turns on the TV, the receiver, and the satellite box, then sets the correct inputs for her and tunes the TV to "Animal Planet" for her.
At the future point where character design can be done with a sketchpad, the controlling agency will no longer be entirely responsible for the infinite possibilities that sketchpad offers.
A cyclops-like visor, however, is one of a limited number of eyepieces (I think there are around 30) that a user might choose for their in-game avatar. Why is it even a choice, if it can be so strongly identified with a single character?
Likewise claws: There's only one character in all of comics who has 3 claws coming out the back of his hand (infringement). There are dozens with animal-like claws on the ends of their fingers (not infringement).
On the flip side, there is no-zero-none reason for CoX's costume creator to offer costume pieces that are identical to those used by Marvel characters (e.g. A visor that looks like the one Cyclops wears). There's no reason for CoX's claws powers to resemble Wolverine's.
If Marvel wants to complain that the creator lets you make a Big green guy with purple pants, that's a bit much. But anyone with a little common sense is going to say those claws look an awful lot like Wolverine's. Out of all the ways claws could've been done, the fact is someone deliberately chose the most potentially infringing way, and someone in a supervisory role at Cryptic obviously approved it.
Marvel's case certainly DID have merit.
Please, please go play that, and help to take the anime influence out of CoX. It's hard enough trying to get a western Super-Hero flavor in City of Heroes when every third person who is logged in has character name based on Sailor Moon or La Blue Girl or whatever the fuck else has huge eyes, tentacles and snot bubbles.
The problem with Consumer reports is that the reports and reviews are not written by experts. They are written by consumers, who have no idea what the hell they're dealing with.
Consumer Reports "best buy" computer every year ends up being a Compaq or a Dell or an HP machine. Anyone who knows anything about computers will get a good chuckle out of their rationale for that rating.
I know a guy who has said much the same thing about their ratings of HVAC equipment.
I'd rather have the opinion of an expert than a purposefully ignorant "consumer".
Chicago Public Radio has a wonderful program called "World View" which does an amazing job of covering non-Middle-Eastern politics. I can't recall them talking about Tonga but I distinctly recall a discussion of Sealand not all that long ago.
Wow. ClearChannel and Infinity are bitching that they're becoming irrelevant.
Who cares? Public Radio (NPR in the US and the CBC in Canada, at least) are vibrant and entertaining.
I used to work for ABC Radio. I remember installing a device that removed "umm..." and "dead air" from the announcer's speech just so they could slide in an extra commercial or two over a one hour period. Everyone who bitches and moans about the 25 minutes of commercials per hour deserves the media conglomerates.
The problem with expecting the world to adopt and open chat protocol is... it won't be. IM is essentially the first communication standard that developed post "Black September" (in the days since AOL peered with the actual Internet and therefore the beginning of widespread internet commericialization). The big swinging dicks of the Internet all have too much at stake to ever allow anything so reasonable as a standard chat protocol to actually function across their networks, as long as their proprietary alternative exists.
The very fact that, 10 years later, Internet users do not yet have a usable, standard instant message program (well, there's ytalk or ntalk... used those lately? Or even heard of them?) suggests that commerical interests have impeded what should be the straightforward procedure of adopting workable standard, and the currrent, fractured state of IM clients among big internet companies leads to the unappealing morass that no-doubt bought the original poster to "Ask Slashdot".
E-mail, most of the time is functionally instant and it has been since at least the mid-90s; I managed two short e-mails back and forth between myself in Indiana and a product support rep for a computer hardware vendor in California earlier today, in under 10 minutes. That's certainly instant enough. Two days? Well, I (barely) remember UUCP. I'll bet a lot of Slashdotters don't.
At any rate, I don't use IM software. No one at my company uses IM software. From my observation, one or two sentence "chatty" comments that get sent with IM software can just as easily be e-mailed; one or two sentences of text certainly aren't the most "abusive" thing that might come through an SMTP server at any given moment. What's the increased functionality that IM gives, anyway?
I have said this before when the subject of IM software comes up:
There is no such thing as good IM software. Everyone has a perfectly good, universal "instant message" protocol. It's called SMTP.
What's wrong with IM?
Well, to talk to everyone you might want to talk to, you need multiple sign-ons for each of the incompatible networks. And you have to configure either a universal client that's going to be borked periodically by official protocol updates, or you have to load five or six "official" clients on your computer.
Plus you have to be willing to trust each company whose IM software you want to use. Is their software secure? Are their servers? How much information is leaked out your PC when you use their protocol? Will they give you a date with an advertising bot?
No thanks.
E-mail is universal, not controlled by any single company and can easily be secured. What's not to love about that?
Windows Server 2003 Web Edition starts (to a login prompt) in 32 seconds on the 100GB, 4200rpm Hitachi drive in my Gateway A64/4000 1GB laptop. That's compares well with the startup time for Server 2003 on *desktop* machines I have, with much faster drives.
My other notebook, a 1GB 1.6GHz Pentium M Thinkpad T40 with an 80GB, 7200rpm Hitachi drive in it, actually starts Server 2003 Web edition about 12 seconds slower.
Yes, some apps start faster on the Thinkpad. Others, there's no perceptible difference, and the latter outweigh the former.
Sager notebooks are basically unbranded versions of Gateway/Dell/HP machines, IIRC.
I've never quite been able to trust their products, truth be told.
On Saturday, for no particular reason, I bought a $1300 Gateway Athlon64/4000 with 1GB RAM and an X600 graphics chip (roughly on-par with a Radeon 9700).
I tried out Farcry on it. It played FINE (granted, not on the highest detail settings). I sat in the passenger seat of a car and played with a trackball.
Later, I tried City of Villains on it. It played fine.
This thing isn't even a "gaming" laptop. An X600 is modest, not exceptional, graphics hardware, but it's good enough for something as modern as Farcry. I'd say mobile gaming is at least a possibility on new hardware.
The other thing is... most laptops (including my 3-day-old Gateway) still ship with 4200rpm drives. And, amazingly, the bit-density of large drives (80GB or 100GB or 120GB) is still good enough to keep up with the faster-spinning power-hungry 5400 and 7200rpm models; drives with high density platters read data in larger chunks regardless. When I look at the trade-off in battery life for going to a faster drive, I'd have to say I'm a little put off. Mostly I'm going to load Firefox and/or a word processor on that thing, and that's about it. Even with a 7200rpm drive, I'm not going to get a huge subjective improvement in performance.
I'm not teribly worried about having my stuff stolen.
I have a ~4 month old set of tapes (borrowed the 5-tape drive from a customer) that would get me back on my feet if I ever had a catastrophy like a fire.
I have around 11TB of disk drives at home. You will too, within the timeframe of something like this becoming available. At that point, 300GB/disc will be just as worthless a 8.5GB DVD would be to you right now.
Besides, there's no indication that these discs will be available in a writeable format.
Anyway, a single-drive LTO and, say, four tapes would only set you back a couple grand. If your home data is important, it's not THAT bad.
Personally, I subdivide and mirror my data on a couple machines. That's good enough for my needs.
I'm sure there's more than one porno titled "In the Flesh" (and what's with all those %20s?)
The better place to look for information about ADULT films is IAFD. In this case, the version you'll want to find is the one produced by VCA.
Oh, it is sad that I know this: You're looking for a movie called "In the Flesh". It is surprisingly, shockingly true to the play.