Linux is $0 on a 1k box. MS software is $200 minimum on a 1k box. OS X is on a 2k box, so you can load up a x86 pc with MS software, and have it competitive with apple.
Please check Apple's current pricing. These are list prices - some stores have them for less.
As of today, a base-model eMac (with CD-ROM) is $800. One with a ComboDrive (DVD-ROM/CD-RW) is $1000. Admittedly, you need to add another 128M of RAM for these to be comfortable running OS X, but that's only a $50 build-to-order option.
A base model iMac (15" flat-panel screen, etc.) is $1300. A base model PowerMac tower is $1500. A base model PowerBook is $1600.
With the exception of the tower-case PowerMac, all of the above systems include a monitor in that price as well.
So where do you come up with the claim that the price of a Mac is a minimum of $2000? You can get a decent OS-X system for as little as $850.
... OpenOffice derivative bundled with every Mac would be a hell of a selling point...
Have you actually used OO on a Mac?
I did. Downloaded and installed it. Deleted it an hour later.
This is one of the worst pieces of trash I've ever used. It requires an X11 server in order to run. The GUI is completely unique - not Mac-like, not Motif-like, not like anything I've used on any platform.
Furthermore, it's ability to import and export MS office files is way overhyped - none of my documents imported correctly. Every one had formatting problems. Embedded objects (images, tables, drawings, etc.) were completely lost. Exporting was even worse - loading its output back into MS Office resulted in even more loss of formatting.
On top of all this, it's incredibly slow. On my dual-1GHz PowerMac, I'm getting performance as slow as WinWord on a 386.
Apple would have to be incredibly stupid to ever consider bundling this program with anything.
At 1.4 nm diameter... you would have a theoretical max resolution of 17.857 million dots/inch or 375,000,000 x 281,250,000 pixels in a 21" screen...
And we'd find out how many applications all crash because they're using 16-bit integers to track the display resolution. Of course, some of us may have a bigger problem buying the 281,025 gigabytes of video RAM may be a bigger problem for you.
You want how much memory capacity on the GeForce-5 chipset now???
The Software Updates utility links to the page. Obviously, the script/user who made the update available hadn't yet put the release notes in place at the time the article was written.
Sorry, I was not clear: it's *advertised* for Macs only, and the box reads "Requires Powermac G4 with such Geforce, MacOSX or 9 bla bla", which is obviously false, since, as I said above, it runs perfectly (with the ADC-DVI adaptor, of course) on my PC with an ATI Radeon 9700pro, and should work with any OS and any graphics card with DVI output.
Except that the monitor's controls don't work without the software support that only exists on MacOS.
... My email address for that ISP was never shared, yet I was receiving about 20 spams per day starting with the very minute I signed up....
This sounds like some other person before you had an account with the same name as yours. I've seen this happen before. It seems like the most likely reason a for a virgin address getting spam from the first minute.
And here's an iron-clad rule: Never read mail online. Most spam is HTML-based, and not only does it phone home, but the dreck that it pulls in can be many times the size of the original message. I use the Mozilla mail client, and never open messages without first clicking on the handy connection icon in the lower right corner.
Mozilla has a few features you may be unaware of:
View->Message Body As. This menu option lets you decide how you view HTML e-mail. Either as-received, as "simplified HTML" where most of the dangerous tags are deleted, or as "plain text". I usually use the "plain text" feature.
Do not load remote images in Mail & Newsgroup messages. This checkbox in the Privacy & Security->Images of the preferences does what it says. If an HTML mail message has a remote image, it won't load. Images sent as a part of the mail will be displayed. This effectively disables "web beacons", "bugs" and other similar methods for determining if you've read mail messages.
Enable JavaScript for Mail & Newsgroups checkbox in the Advanced->Scripts & Plugins page of the preference does what it says. Disabling JavaScript in mail is another good way to keep spammers from knowing if you've read their spam or not.
On that same preferences page is a checkbox for Enable Plugins for Mail & Newsgroups - you probably never want to enable this. I have yet to see a legitimate reason for receiving any kind of plugin-based content in any mail message.
I've been finding that the Mozilla people seem to be doing a good job of adding useful anti-spam features to their Mail & News client.
I don't get spam. I just don't get any. I don't let my e-mail get out to stupid places on the net where a spider will get them. I don't sign up for weird things. I avoid anything slightly untrustworthy. And as a result I get no spam
That's great if you can pull it off, but most of us don't have that luxury.
There are five e-mail addresses that can reach me, which get different degrees of spam, due to different abilities to keep them private:
The primary address for my ISP is kept completely private - I don't give this address to anybody - not even my immediate family. It's not a word that appears in the dictionary. Only my ISP and I know this address, and the only thing I get from them is the monthly receipt for the bill. This account has not received any spam (at all - not one) in many years, although the mailbox that forwards itself into this mailbox does get spam.
My second mailbox is also from my ISP. It forwards everything into the primary address. The idea here is that I can blow away this mailbox without blowing away my ISP account along with it. I give this address to family, friends and some private mailing lists. This address gets some spam, but not very much.
The third mailbox is a web-mail box from mail.com. This is my spam-trap address, which I use on all web sites, newsgroup postings, and for my shopping. I expect this one to get spammed, but because it uses a web interface, I can sift through the subject lines and delete the spam without downloading it. The surprising thing is that this mailbox doesn't get nearly as much spam as the next two to.
The fourth mailbox is the moderator address for a mailing list I run. Unfortunately, I can't hide this one, since non-subscribers may need it if they have a problem subscribing. It gets spammed extensively. Typically about 40-80 spams a week.
Finally, there's my work mailbox. Due to the nature of my job, I must frequently post messages to IETF working group mailing lists with this address, and those lists are mirrored to many web sites. These lists are the only public places that I ever use this address, and the company directory is not accessible to the outside world. This account typically gets 30-60 spams a day.
It is interesting to note that the two mailboxes whose addresses appear on web pages are the ones that get spammed to death, while the one I use for newsgroup postings gets relatively little in comparison. It used to be that Usenet posts would be a lightening rod for spammers.
On the plus side, ever since Mozilla version 1.3 came out, it hasn't bothered me nearly as much. Current Mozilla releases have a spam filter that learns by example. You click a button to tag spam as "junk" and Mozilla constructs its own filters. If it guesses wrong, you click the button to tag legitimate mail as "not junk". After about two weeks of training, it becomes very accurate. I recently returned to work after a week's vacation to find about 210 spams in my mailbox - Mozilla correctly filtered 200 of them into a junk-mail folder with no false positives.
Ummmm.... You are aware that this $199 includes a $40G hard drive, Ethernet card, mouse and keyboard, right? That's not really out of line with what it would cost to buy these separately.
I would just like to add that I don't see the point either. Why bother buying Mac hardware if you don't want to run MacOS?
If you want non-Intel box to use exclusively for running UNIX apps, you'd be better off with something like a Sun Blade 100. A 500MHz UltraSPARC system that costs less than most decent Macs and PCs. And it comes with UNIX (Solaris) factory-installed. If you really don't like Solaris, you can install Linux for SPARC on it.
I develop network protocol stack code for a living.
Endinanness isn't entirely trial and error. The big deal is that you must explicitly convert any value that you read from an external source (a network socket or a data file that may be read by a different implementation.) Similar conversions must be done whenever you write data to such an external destination.
The biggest problem you find when porting code that wasn't designed for portability is people who decide to read a block of bytes from a file/socket and then cast a struct pointer onto it. This is inherently evil. It only works if the endinanness matches, and the compiler pads the struct identically to the external source.
The solution is to parse the buffer byte-by-byte, arithmetically combine the bytes into their integer values, and then assign them into a struct. For instance, if I have code that is trying to read a 2-byte integer, followed by three 3-byte integers (ignoring possible I/O errors, for simplicity), this would be a bad and non-portable implementation:
typedef struct foo
{
short a;
longb[3];
} foo;
foo*fooptr;
charbuffer[14];
read(fd, buffer, 14);
fooptr = (foo *)buffer; ...
The above code assumes that the size of long and short will be exactly 4- and 2-bytes, respectively. It assumes that the integer representation matches that of the data stream. And it assumes that the compiler not insert any padding between the structure members.
Using the same struct, this code would be portable across all platforms (assuming that the data is big-endian format. If the data is little-endian, the solution is left as an exercise for the reader):
It's a bit more tedious to write and read, but it will work on all platforms, regardless of the internal representation of integers and structs. It will even work if the internal size of short and long variables is longer than the usual 16- and 32-bits (which is legal according to ANSI-C). And the ugliness can be mostly avoided through use of macros (or inline functions, if you prefer.)
If your data format consists entirely of big-endian integers of 16- and 32-bit sizes, you can also use the system-provided ntohs(), htons(), ntohl(), and htonl() functions. If your data is little-endian format, or some other format, then you obviously must roll your own converters.
I would be interested to know which IM protocol Trillian is using.
AOL's servers use two different protocols. They have their proprietary "oscar" protocol, which is used by the official AIM clients, and then they have the open "toc" protocol that is used by open source AIM packages like TiK
I have some friends who work (or did until the recent layoffs) for AOL, and they have said that AOL works hard to keep the oscar protocol private, while they don't object to people using the toc protocol.
Re:Point to point protocol for Messaging
on
AOL vs. Trillian
·
· Score: 1
They are not using the Quake figures to compare their Mac against a PC. They are using it to compare the GeForce4 MX video against other Apple video boards (Radion 7500 and GeForce2 MX).
I suspect a DDR chipset would increase the price, and maybe complicate the board design. Apple's engineers probably decided that the advantages in real-world apps wouldn't be enough to offset the redesign.
BTW, it is worth noting that the two highest-end G4 systems (the 933MHz and the dual-1GHz) use DDR SDRAM memory as the L3 cache. (See Apple's architecture page.) I haven't run tests, but I wouldn't be too surprised if DDR as L3 cache has almost the same impact on overall performance as using DDR for all of main memory.
You should note, however, that the original iMac has not been discontinued. The two lowest-cost iMacs are still sold (500MHz G3 for $800, and 600MHz G3 for $1000). The other two G3-iMac models were discontinued, because they were priced at the same point as the G4-iMacs.
Apple had a lot of different layouts, back when the ADB interface was the keyboard interface for a Mac. Two of the most popular layouts were the "Keyboard II" and "Extended Keyboard II". They used these layouts.
The "tiny key" syndrome was introduced when they started using this layout with the introduction of the B&W G3 and the iMac.
For comparison here's the current layout, which they are shipping with the current model G4 towers and the flat-panel iMac.
I have been very impressed with Apple's longevity for a long time now.
I have an old Mac SE. It is old and slow, make no mistake about it. A 7MHz 68000 with 4M RAM is never going to compete with hardware that's orders of magnitude faster. Nevertheless, it can still run useful software. Claris FileMaker Pro 2.0 (which is still a very useful database package) runs on it. Ditto for MS Word 5, and several other apps. It can even multitask apps using System 7.55 (or MultiFinder on System 6) It also shares my LAN.
I defy anybody today to run useful software on the equivalent PC (A 1986-era PC would be an XT with 640K RAM).
My second Mac is a Quadra 840av (40MHz 68040). I actually use this box a lot, and run quite a bit of stuff on it. Claris Works and FileMaker 4.0 both run fine. It can web surf with the best of us. The equivalent PC would be a 486/66 - they are still usable today, but they feel slower than my Quadra does.
(FWIW, I finally decided to bite the bullet and get a new Mac yesterday. I've ordered one of the new dual-1GHz systems. I expect to get at least 10 years worth of solid service out of it, given how well my other machines have held up.)
I would like to think so, but they've been proven liars in the past.
Several years ago, when Canter & Segal (the "green card lawyers" who broke the ice for spammers) were abusing the internet, the DMA announced that they would be creating a "global opt out list". Supposedly, you'd add your address to the list, and no DMA member would ever spam you.
Except it didn't work. Many people at news.admin.net-abuse.email decided to test this list. They created virgin e-mail accounts and submitted the addresses to the DMA opt-out list. Within hours, the accounts were spammed. Since the addresses were never used anywhere other than the DMA list, it became obvious that either the DMA was spamming from that list, or they were making it available to spammers.
If they think I'm going to trust them this time around, they're crazy.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
Of course, if the brightest physicists in the world haven't been able to come up with a practical method for tapping vacuum energy, I don't for an instant believe that some guy who isn't even a physicist managed to figure out how to do it in his garage. And I certainly don't believe he'd be keeping its inner workings (or his identity or his location, for that matter) a secret if it was real. If this was real, and he published, he would win an instant Nobel prize. But he won't publish, because he's a complete fraud, and he knows it.
The humungous size of storage, and the exponential growth rate of drives has never ceased to amaze me.
In 1980, I was using a TRS-80 with a cassette tape interface. Not a lot of storage, unreliable and quite slow.
In 1983, I started using an Apple-II with its 140K floppy drive. I went through all of high school keeping everything I ever wrote on only 20 disks.
In 1987, the computers in college had 20M hard drives. One machine I had access to had a 40M drive, and there was almost never a shortage of space.
In 1988, I got my first 1.44M floppy drive, and found that it took a really long time to fill them. (I was working with 360K floppies until then.)
In 1989, I got my first hard drive - an 80M model, which blew away all the machines that the school was providing in the labs.
In 1991, I got my first 1G drive and couldn't imagine ever filling it. Until I started getting OSs like Windows and apps like Office.
Today, 40G drives are pretty much generic standard issue, and 100G drives aren't terribly expensive either.
Today, I can't imagine needing that much storage (Right now, my home system has about 5G of stuff (on 11G worth of media), which includes three operating systems and an installation of MS Office.) But I'm sure the need for it will arise soon, and even bigger drives will become cheap and popular.
It's the nature of things. Engineering continually makes stuff smaller and cheaper, and data always grows to consume all available space.
Anyway, to keep this somewhat on-topic, it doesn't surprise me that archive.org was able to build a 100TB server farm. Today, you can get a 160GB drive for $275 (according to a listing on PriceWatch). 100TB is 625 of these drives, which would cost about $172,000. (Of course, it would really cost less, because 625 drives would qualify for a rather large bulk-purchase discount.)
Maybe technically, but as long as they are willing to quickly pull a site from the archive, and work with the site owner to prevent future content from being archived, I can't see how it will ever end up in court.
Lawyers are expensive. Nobody is going to file suit without first sending a "please remove my data from your archive" letter.
And if some site owner is completely stupid and sues first, they can simply pull the pages from the archive, then show up in court and say "we deleted their pages as soon as we were made aware of the problem", and the judge will dismiss the entire case.
According to Apple (and verified by my own research), the connector is unique to Apple, although the signals are similar to DVI, so adapters may be used. (I believe Apple sells such an adapter.)
Slashdot Mirror
Please check Apple's current pricing. These are list prices - some stores have them for less.
As of today, a base-model eMac (with CD-ROM) is $800. One with a ComboDrive (DVD-ROM/CD-RW) is $1000. Admittedly, you need to add another 128M of RAM for these to be comfortable running OS X, but that's only a $50 build-to-order option.
A base model iMac (15" flat-panel screen, etc.) is $1300. A base model PowerMac tower is $1500. A base model PowerBook is $1600.
With the exception of the tower-case PowerMac, all of the above systems include a monitor in that price as well.
So where do you come up with the claim that the price of a Mac is a minimum of $2000? You can get a decent OS-X system for as little as $850.
Have you actually used OO on a Mac?
I did. Downloaded and installed it. Deleted it an hour later.
This is one of the worst pieces of trash I've ever used. It requires an X11 server in order to run. The GUI is completely unique - not Mac-like, not Motif-like, not like anything I've used on any platform.
Furthermore, it's ability to import and export MS office files is way overhyped - none of my documents imported correctly. Every one had formatting problems. Embedded objects (images, tables, drawings, etc.) were completely lost. Exporting was even worse - loading its output back into MS Office resulted in even more loss of formatting.
On top of all this, it's incredibly slow. On my dual-1GHz PowerMac, I'm getting performance as slow as WinWord on a 386.
Apple would have to be incredibly stupid to ever consider bundling this program with anything.
It's only fair. Most of what I have had to say about MS in the past few years is already unprintable :-).
And we'd find out how many applications all crash because they're using 16-bit integers to track the display resolution. Of course, some of us may have a bigger problem buying the 281,025 gigabytes of video RAM may be a bigger problem for you.
You want how much memory capacity on the GeForce-5 chipset now???
It's there now, however.
Except that the monitor's controls don't work without the software support that only exists on MacOS.
I'd say it works. I wouldn't say "perfectly".
This sounds like some other person before you had an account with the same name as yours. I've seen this happen before. It seems like the most likely reason a for a virgin address getting spam from the first minute.
Mozilla has a few features you may be unaware of:
-
View->Message Body As. This menu option lets you decide how you view HTML e-mail. Either as-received, as "simplified HTML" where most of the dangerous tags are deleted, or as "plain text". I usually use the "plain text" feature.
-
Do not load remote images in Mail & Newsgroup messages. This checkbox in the Privacy & Security->Images of the preferences does what it says. If an HTML mail message has a remote image, it won't load. Images sent as a part of the mail will be displayed. This effectively disables "web beacons", "bugs" and other similar methods for determining if you've read mail messages.
-
Enable JavaScript for Mail & Newsgroups checkbox in the Advanced->Scripts & Plugins page of the preference does what it says. Disabling JavaScript in mail is another good way to keep spammers from knowing if you've read their spam or not.
-
On that same preferences page is a checkbox for Enable Plugins for Mail & Newsgroups - you probably never want to enable this. I have yet to see a legitimate reason for receiving any kind of plugin-based content in any mail message.
I've been finding that the Mozilla people seem to be doing a good job of adding useful anti-spam features to their Mail & News client.-- David
That's great if you can pull it off, but most of us don't have that luxury.
There are five e-mail addresses that can reach me, which get different degrees of spam, due to different abilities to keep them private:
-
The primary address for my ISP is kept completely private - I don't give this address to anybody - not even my immediate family. It's not a word that appears in the dictionary. Only my ISP and I know this address, and the only thing I get from them is the monthly receipt for the bill. This account has not received any spam (at all - not one) in many years, although the mailbox that forwards itself into this mailbox does get spam.
-
My second mailbox is also from my ISP. It forwards everything into the primary address. The idea here is that I can blow away this mailbox without blowing away my ISP account along with it. I give this address to family, friends and some private mailing lists. This address gets some spam, but not very much.
-
The third mailbox is a web-mail box from mail.com. This is my spam-trap address, which I use on all web sites, newsgroup postings, and for my shopping. I expect this one to get spammed, but because it uses a web interface, I can sift through the subject lines and delete the spam without downloading it. The surprising thing is that this mailbox doesn't get nearly as much spam as the next two to.
-
The fourth mailbox is the moderator address for a mailing list I run. Unfortunately, I can't hide this one, since non-subscribers may need it if they have a problem subscribing. It gets spammed extensively. Typically about 40-80 spams a week.
-
Finally, there's my work mailbox. Due to the nature of my job, I must frequently post messages to IETF working group mailing lists with this address, and those lists are mirrored to many web sites. These lists are the only public places that I ever use this address, and the company directory is not accessible to the outside world. This account typically gets 30-60 spams a day.
It is interesting to note that the two mailboxes whose addresses appear on web pages are the ones that get spammed to death, while the one I use for newsgroup postings gets relatively little in comparison. It used to be that Usenet posts would be a lightening rod for spammers.On the plus side, ever since Mozilla version 1.3 came out, it hasn't bothered me nearly as much. Current Mozilla releases have a spam filter that learns by example. You click a button to tag spam as "junk" and Mozilla constructs its own filters. If it guesses wrong, you click the button to tag legitimate mail as "not junk". After about two weeks of training, it becomes very accurate. I recently returned to work after a week's vacation to find about 210 spams in my mailbox - Mozilla correctly filtered 200 of them into a junk-mail folder with no false positives.
-- David
Ummmm.... You are aware that this $199 includes a $40G hard drive, Ethernet card, mouse and keyboard, right? That's not really out of line with what it would cost to buy these separately.
If you want non-Intel box to use exclusively for running UNIX apps, you'd be better off with something like a Sun Blade 100. A 500MHz UltraSPARC system that costs less than most decent Macs and PCs. And it comes with UNIX (Solaris) factory-installed. If you really don't like Solaris, you can install Linux for SPARC on it.
Endinanness isn't entirely trial and error. The big deal is that you must explicitly convert any value that you read from an external source (a network socket or a data file that may be read by a different implementation.) Similar conversions must be done whenever you write data to such an external destination.
The biggest problem you find when porting code that wasn't designed for portability is people who decide to read a block of bytes from a file/socket and then cast a struct pointer onto it. This is inherently evil. It only works if the endinanness matches, and the compiler pads the struct identically to the external source.
The solution is to parse the buffer byte-by-byte, arithmetically combine the bytes into their integer values, and then assign them into a struct. For instance, if I have code that is trying to read a 2-byte integer, followed by three 3-byte integers (ignoring possible I/O errors, for simplicity), this would be a bad and non-portable implementation:
The above code assumes that the size of long and short will be exactly 4- and 2-bytes, respectively. It assumes that the integer representation matches that of the data stream. And it assumes that the compiler not insert any padding between the structure members.
Using the same struct, this code would be portable across all platforms (assuming that the data is big-endian format. If the data is little-endian, the solution is left as an exercise for the reader):
It's a bit more tedious to write and read, but it will work on all platforms, regardless of the internal representation of integers and structs. It will even work if the internal size of short and long variables is longer than the usual 16- and 32-bits (which is legal according to ANSI-C). And the ugliness can be mostly avoided through use of macros (or inline functions, if you prefer.)
If your data format consists entirely of big-endian integers of 16- and 32-bit sizes, you can also use the system-provided ntohs(), htons(), ntohl(), and htonl() functions. If your data is little-endian format, or some other format, then you obviously must roll your own converters.
AOL's servers use two different protocols. They have their proprietary "oscar" protocol, which is used by the official AIM clients, and then they have the open "toc" protocol that is used by open source AIM packages like TiK
I have some friends who work (or did until the recent layoffs) for AOL, and they have said that AOL works hard to keep the oscar protocol private, while they don't object to people using the toc protocol.
You mean like /usr/bin/talk?
Ummm.... It's not spam if you asked for it, you know.
They are not using the Quake figures to compare their Mac against a PC. They are using it to compare the GeForce4 MX video against other Apple video boards (Radion 7500 and GeForce2 MX).
BTW, it is worth noting that the two highest-end G4 systems (the 933MHz and the dual-1GHz) use DDR SDRAM memory as the L3 cache. (See Apple's architecture page.) I haven't run tests, but I wouldn't be too surprised if DDR as L3 cache has almost the same impact on overall performance as using DDR for all of main memory.
You should note, however, that the original iMac has not been discontinued. The two lowest-cost iMacs are still sold (500MHz G3 for $800, and 600MHz G3 for $1000). The other two G3-iMac models were discontinued, because they were priced at the same point as the G4-iMacs.
The "tiny key" syndrome was introduced when they started using this layout with the introduction of the B&W G3 and the iMac.
For comparison here's the current layout, which they are shipping with the current model G4 towers and the flat-panel iMac.
I have an old Mac SE. It is old and slow, make no mistake about it. A 7MHz 68000 with 4M RAM is never going to compete with hardware that's orders of magnitude faster. Nevertheless, it can still run useful software. Claris FileMaker Pro 2.0 (which is still a very useful database package) runs on it. Ditto for MS Word 5, and several other apps. It can even multitask apps using System 7.55 (or MultiFinder on System 6) It also shares my LAN.
I defy anybody today to run useful software on the equivalent PC (A 1986-era PC would be an XT with 640K RAM).
My second Mac is a Quadra 840av (40MHz 68040). I actually use this box a lot, and run quite a bit of stuff on it. Claris Works and FileMaker 4.0 both run fine. It can web surf with the best of us. The equivalent PC would be a 486/66 - they are still usable today, but they feel slower than my Quadra does.
(FWIW, I finally decided to bite the bullet and get a new Mac yesterday. I've ordered one of the new dual-1GHz systems. I expect to get at least 10 years worth of solid service out of it, given how well my other machines have held up.)
Several years ago, when Canter & Segal (the "green card lawyers" who broke the ice for spammers) were abusing the internet, the DMA announced that they would be creating a "global opt out list". Supposedly, you'd add your address to the list, and no DMA member would ever spam you.
Except it didn't work. Many people at news.admin.net-abuse.email decided to test this list. They created virgin e-mail accounts and submitted the addresses to the DMA opt-out list. Within hours, the accounts were spammed. Since the addresses were never used anywhere other than the DMA list, it became obvious that either the DMA was spamming from that list, or they were making it available to spammers.
If they think I'm going to trust them this time around, they're crazy.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
Modern physics theory says that there is a tremendous amount of energy in otherwise empty space. But no existing device can tap this.
I first read about vacuum energy in a book called Indistinguishable From Magic by Robert L. Forward.
Of course, if the brightest physicists in the world haven't been able to come up with a practical method for tapping vacuum energy, I don't for an instant believe that some guy who isn't even a physicist managed to figure out how to do it in his garage. And I certainly don't believe he'd be keeping its inner workings (or his identity or his location, for that matter) a secret if it was real. If this was real, and he published, he would win an instant Nobel prize. But he won't publish, because he's a complete fraud, and he knows it.
- In 1980, I was using a TRS-80 with a cassette tape interface. Not a lot of storage, unreliable and quite slow.
- In 1983, I started using an Apple-II with its 140K floppy drive. I went through all of high school keeping everything I ever wrote on only 20 disks.
- In 1987, the computers in college had 20M hard drives. One machine I had access to had a 40M drive, and there was almost never a shortage of space.
- In 1988, I got my first 1.44M floppy drive, and found that it took a really long time to fill them. (I was working with 360K floppies until then.)
- In 1989, I got my first hard drive - an 80M model, which blew away all the machines that the school was providing in the labs.
- In 1991, I got my first 1G drive and couldn't imagine ever filling it. Until I started getting OSs like Windows and apps like Office.
- Today, 40G drives are pretty much generic standard issue, and 100G drives aren't terribly expensive either.
Today, I can't imagine needing that much storage (Right now, my home system has about 5G of stuff (on 11G worth of media), which includes three operating systems and an installation of MS Office.) But I'm sure the need for it will arise soon, and even bigger drives will become cheap and popular.It's the nature of things. Engineering continually makes stuff smaller and cheaper, and data always grows to consume all available space.
Anyway, to keep this somewhat on-topic, it doesn't surprise me that archive.org was able to build a 100TB server farm. Today, you can get a 160GB drive for $275 (according to a listing on PriceWatch). 100TB is 625 of these drives, which would cost about $172,000. (Of course, it would really cost less, because 625 drives would qualify for a rather large bulk-purchase discount.)
Lawyers are expensive. Nobody is going to file suit without first sending a "please remove my data from your archive" letter.
And if some site owner is completely stupid and sues first, they can simply pull the pages from the archive, then show up in court and say "we deleted their pages as soon as we were made aware of the problem", and the judge will dismiss the entire case.
This is not the same as the EVC connector.
According to Apple (and verified by my own research), the connector is unique to Apple, although the signals are similar to DVI, so adapters may be used. (I believe Apple sells such an adapter.)