Three 5.25" bays hold twelve 2.5" drives with a combined capacity of twelve TB.
Ick, ick, ick. So you're proposing to fit a case with a bunch of noisy, underperforming, low air volume 40mm fans? And not just 2, but 6? And you expect those fans to last for more then a few months before they start making even more noise?
At least the earlier linked 2.5" backplane uses a pair of 60mm fans. Which are going to be quieter and more likely to last. I'd bet they move enough air to keep those 8 drives cool as well, even in a warmer location.
The AI has been split up into layers, IIRC, with each opponent actually coming up with a strategy to victory based on personal preferences and game conditions.
This already happens a bit in Civ4:BtS (especially with BetterAI). There was a lot of work in 2009 by the modders on making the pacifist leaders more likely to pursue diplomatic victory or culture victory over military victory. There's weirdly named variables that handle that for each leader, and things to be tweaked in the XML or data files that could impact warlike or peacenik behavior.
The layering is new, as is the concept of an over-arching goal. It's something we saw a bit in various games this past decade though. So not a completely new concept. But any improvement to the Civ5 basic AI will be welcome, hopefully it plays as well out of the gate as the Civ4:BtS AI plays.
No, we just all spawned in our mom's basements and it's going to take at least 20 turns to find another civilization to communicate with.
Which touches deeply on pacing. One thing that Civ4 taught me is that you need to consider the # of turns before the game is won/last during the design phase. This comes into play in numerous ways:
- A player clicking "next" 50x in a row without changing anything or making a decision isn't having fun. They're just watching a movie, one frame at a time.
- Your map size and travel speed need to be balanced. The world needs to feel large enough for those who want something huge, but it shouldn't take 1/4 of the game turns to travel from one end to another. At the same time, if you can get from one end of a large game world to another in 3 turns, you've probably boosted travel speed too much.
- Consider how much micro-management has to be done each turn. Some players will complain if it takes more then 15 seconds to finish a turn, others want enough to do that it takes 15-30 minutes per turn.
My personal preference is a size/speed where I have to make strategic choices 15-30 turns in advance. Which is why I always ended up playing Marathon speed on larger maps and taking 1500-2500 turns to finish (20-40 hours of gameplay). A big war might take 20-40 turns to setup, and then 40-60 turns to execute.
The downside, is that at the beginning of the game, I'm spending a lot of time just clicking "next turn". My worker is busy, my city is busy, and my lone warrior is pretty much out of things to explore after turn 50.
Different maps, play as different civs, make sure you patch the AI with one of the AI mods to make it more aggressive or diplomatic and just better at waging war.
Try a leader that doesn't come of age until mid-late game. Turn off different win conditions and go for a space or diplo win instead of whichever way your normally win.
Play a larger map, with more civs. Which makes things much more difficult.
Turn on raging barbs, and laugh as 1/5 of the civs get smothered at birth due to the barbarian hordes. Laugh harder when it's your civ that gets destroyed.
GalCiv 2 is there to satisfy "Masters of Orion" hunger - not Civilization:).
Eh... the thing I hated about MOO2 towards the end was that once you got some of the top-end engine techs, your ships basically had infinite range and nearly infinite speed. So you really couldn't setup a proper defense as space basically became tiny and almost dimensionless.
I've tried to get into GalCiv 2 a few times - and I just can't do it. The flat galaxy, with a 2D playfield, and no bottlenecks is just too 1990s for me. GC2 Twilight of the Arnor is still sitting on my hard drive, gathering electronic dust.
Maybe they'll switch to an actual stellar topography in GC3 or GC4. Something like what MOO3 tried to do, with semi-3D galactic clusters of stars (they kept the map very flat to keep it simple), with starlanes and choke points, etc. I was really looking forward to MOO3 because it was going to re-introduce the concept that terrain matters and you can't just fly from one location to another in 3 turns.
Which also explains why I like Civ4 so much and why I play on very large Tectonics maps with complicated geography (lots of little inlets and unpassable mountain ranges).
Only for the old fogey's who refused to learn new things.
Personally, I never got into the old Civ II/III games. The graphics were crude and I just didn't feel like doing a earth-based TBS (my preference at the time was either sci-fi setting or fantasy).
Civ IV, OTOH, had enough graphical and audio bling to suck me in. It's the first of the Civ series that played, and I greatly enjoyed both expansions (warlords and BtS). I still ended up modding it slightly to remove annoyances (the better UI mod and the AI improvement mods were a must).
I still dig out BtS occasionally and try out a Tectonics, 60% water map on one of the larger map sizes. Definitely worth the money that I paid and I'm looking forward to Civ V.
I prefer simply NoScript + FlashBlock. I don't care about ads that are well behaved and aren't scripted. I do care about ads that use JavaScript or Flash and act like temperamental two year olds hopped up on sugar.
Plus there's the whole issue of JavaScript/Flash constantly being used as an infection vector. So in the past few years it's become more about safety in blocking scripts then about blocking ads. I'm tired of cleaning off machines that were infected via ads or other JavaScript/Flash vectors.
One core is sufficient for 99% of office workstations that only run a browser and MS Office applications. Dual-core is a bit more snappy, but I'd rather spend an extra hundred bucks on an SSD for the O/S volume than a more-core processor.
Gods no. Have you ever spent time using equivalent machines, one with dual-core and one with single-core? The dual-core blows the single-core out of the water in terms of responsiveness. Quad-cores might be overkill for office use, but only until their prices drop.
And it's not like multi-core is expensive anymore. Hell, NewEgg only sells (2) single-core CPUs now ($36 for AMD, $40 for the Intel). In comparison there are (42) dual-core CPUs listed, and they start at about $50. That's a far cry from "save an extra hundred bucks".
Nowadays, I usually shop by a combination of thermal design envelope (i.e. look for a 65W CPU) combined with "what can I get for $80". And that number used to be $150 for the CPU. With quad-cores as low as $80 now, it won't be long before we'll be putting quads on the desktop. Hopefully something with a 45W or 65W design so that we can keep them quiet and cool. The current quads are 95W or 125W for the most part. I wish AMD still made their 45W CPU line, those were great for office machines.
If they can get the 150GB SSDs down below $100, I'll strongly consider switching all of our desktops over. Once you head to multi-core and have enough RAM, HD speeds become the biggest bottleneck.
Oh, I wouldn't say that. A couple weeks ago I decided to upgrade my 8800GTS.
I'm in a similar boat, running an 8800 GT 512MB card that is getting long in the tooth.
The GTX 460 1GB looks like the successor to the old 8800GT 512MB. Lowish power draw, lowish noise and heat, but with excellent performance for about $200. I used to run a pair of 8800GT in SLI mode, but so much of my gaming is now done in windowed mode, with a 2nd monitor running that the SLI didn't get me anything. (SLI is disabled on the 8800GT if you have 2 monitors active.)
I'm still tempted by the GTX 465 1GB part... but will probably go with the GTX 460 1GB part instead in late summer.
Because as recent as around 5-10 years ago, when Google were a lot smaller incidentally, I can recall using web browsers (mainly IE) where it was getting almost impossible to browse anywhere without 8 or 9 pop-up windows appearing that advertised all manner of sexual and non-sexual services and products - nowadays it's an unobtrusive Google ad at the side of the page or maybe an Adobe Flash advert or two at the top or bottom.
Which has little to do with advertisers behaving better, and has a lot more to do with web browsers and users fighting back with pop-up blockers, NoScript, ad blockers, FlashBlock, etc.
If the browsers hadn't added those features, we'd still be dealing with lots and lots of pop-up and pop-under ads.
One of my computers had an intermittent failure in a RAM chip/line/something somewhere that mostly manifested as SHA/MD5 failures when I was checksumming large files that I'd downloaded. Never showed up in Memtest86, but eventually I eliminated every other possibility. IIRC, I solved it by underclocking the machine and then replacing it when I was able.
Try Prime95 next time if you're trying to track down intermittent errors like that with CPU/RAM.
(Those of us in the know have been using it for 10-15 years now, because it pegs the CPU at 100% and does very complex calculations with cross-checks that uses up lots and lots of memory.)
HTML5 will help change the Web, however, the true change that will come to the Web is finally when the Semantic Web will take off; unfortunately no one knows when or if it ever will.
The Semantic Web will never happen - until you solve the underlying problem that the person exerting all the effort to make it semantic reaps none of the benefits. People, on the whole, are lazy and will exert minimum effort.
Tags, categorization, metadata only get applied by a tiny subset of people creating content. And for the most part, that extra data only gets added if the author needs it in order to keep track or find older content. All of the rest of the content gets published willy-nilly with no attempt at metadata. If you're lucky, there will be some OCD person out there willing to categorize things for free, but you can't depend on that.
(Then there's the whole issue of people inputting false information into the system either out of maliciousness or fraud. Witness all of the nonsense that happens with the META keyword tag.)
Tapes are small, disposable, cheap, reliable. Hard drives are maybe 2 of those.
The media may be cheap, but the drives are expensive and sometimes proprietary. So you'd best be a big enough outfit to buy at least multiple drives. Not to mention that you need to replace tapes regularly. At $2000/drive and needing at least three, plus needing 60 tapes per year at $30ea... you could buy around 30-40 1TB hard drives, with carry cases or trays. And you need to lay out that $7500 right at the start, plus the $1800/year. That's a lot of money for a small business with under 20 employees.
(And most tape drives are more like $3k to $4k each.)
The big problem with tape for smaller shops is simply up-front cost. For $150, they can buy a single 1TB drive and use that to write backups to. Each week, they buy a new drive until they are rotating 5 or 6 of them. Or if they really need to get data offsite daily, they'll do a delta-backup over the WAN links. Or spend enough to have 10 hard drives in rotation.
(We use a mix of backup over WAN links nightly/weekly combined with taking hard drives offsite weekly.)
Actually, since semiconductor manufacturing gets cheaper practically exponentially (yay Moore's law) eventually SSD prices should catch up and undercut mechanical disk prices, just because of the manufacturing process. But that's a long ways off yet.
Well... maybe. NAND flash isn't too many generations away from hitting a lithography wall from what I remember. And we're still 10x-20x more expensive then magnetic media on a $/GB measurement. 2.5" laptop drives are in the 0.14-0.17 $/GB range, while SSDs are still up in the 1.36-2.34 $/GB range.
Assuming that we're already down in the 40-50nm(?) range for flash media, can they really manage to squeeze one more order of magnitude out of the feature sizes? (Closer to 3x smaller features since you double the bits at sqrt() feature size.) If they can make NAND flash down at 10-15nm, then yes we might see $/GB prices below $0.20.
25nm is apparently around the corner, so we might see a 2x-4x price improvement soon. The question is how much headroom is left after that.
Almost all of the "careers" in EVE are done by players for players (except for the mission runners), you can:
- be a mission runner for NPC corps, earning loyalty points and ISK (money), usually to fund other activities
- become a station trader where you attempt to buy (items) low and sell high
- manufacturer of basic modules & ships
- inventor of more advanced modules & ships (T2 or Tech II)
- become a courier, moving goods from A to B to fulfill contracts (usually player contracts)
- buy goods at far flung locations, haul them to where they can be more easily sold for a higher price
- mine rocks all day, sell the minerals or feed them into a production chain
- salvage wrecks, sell the results or use it to build stuff
- explore for hidden sites that may offer good loot or a chance to be sent on a wild-goose chase around the region for better loot
- setup player owned structures, in order to research blueprints to reduce waste or to create things without waiting on NPC research slots or NPC production slots to open up
- be a low-sec pirate where you camp gates, asteroid belts, stations and attempt to kill & loot or ransom other players for money
- live in a worm-hole, disconnected (mostly) from the main star systems (and do exploration / mining / research / manufacturing inside)
- spy for a corp/alliance, hunting down targets, or player owned structures, or industrial locations
- plant your flag out in null-sec and claim sovereignty over a set of systems, then defend that turf against other players
- be a low-sec pirate hunter, roaming low-security space looking for people with bad standings
- be a hi-sec mercenary, where corps hire you to declare war on their rivals, you get to disrupt their hi-sec operations for a week or more
- try your hand at corporate theft, where you gain the trust of a corp, then rob them blind
- scam other players out of ISK, ships, goods
- run a training corp and teach other players aspects of the game that you know well
- become a monopolist and attempt to control or influence all market activity in a particular sector
- setup a POS in orbit at a moon and harvest the resources
- do similar on planets with the new Planetary Interaction feature to produce basic goods used by players and manufacturing
- engage in small-scale PvP, or stealth bomber fleets, or large-scale cap-ship fights where 100v100 is a small engagement
EVE is very much "what do you bring to the table" rather then "here's content, go do it". The majority of it, you'll need acquaintances and contacts in order to complete missing parts of the system that you can't do alone. In my experience, it's a much more social game then WoW.
So I was surprised by the number of poster that do like them.
Try asking someone who's livelihood depends on accurate touch-typing, where your fingers always start properly aligned on the home row.
With a pointer nubby, I can keep my fingers on the home row and quickly bump the mouse to click on a stupid dialog or select some text. Without that, I have to take one hand all the way over to a separate mouse and spend 3x as long taking care of the dialog box.
Would I want to draw figures with it? Hell no. But in 99% of the times when I would normally reach for a mouse, I can quickly accomplish the same task with a light touch on the pointer nubby. (Helps if you set the mouse sensitivity setting to "extremely sensitive" so that you can use a very small touch on the nubby to cover large distances.)
It's the primary reason that I haven't bought a OS X laptop, even though it would be very nice. I can't stand trackpads, they're way too finicky.
Look at FSVS instead. It's designed for versioning Linux/Unix servers.
# cd/etc
# fsvs ci -m "getting ready to change stuff"
# (change stuff)
# fsvs ci -m "changed stuff"
I keep entire servers (except for temp files and user data that gets backed up in another manner) versioned using FSVS. The repositories are stored on a 2nd machine and I can use other SVN tools to browse that repository and review changes.
And merging your changes to an old config file with the incoming one via etc-update? That was always a crapshoot. 90% of the time it would work fine. The other 10% something would break and require a few hours of digging around to fix it.
Google for FSVS, version your configuration files (or even the entire machine except for temp / sys / user files). And if you keep the repository on a 2nd machine, you can use any available SVN client tool to poke and prod to see what changed when the primary machine won't boot.
# fsvs ci -m "preparing to do things"
# (do some stuff)
# fsvs ci -m "did X, Y and Z while upgrading Q"
(uh oh)
Look at FSVS logs, look at FSVS diffs, fix what broke within a few minutes because you know exactly what changed during your update.
So why not make an effort to preserve privacy by storing the results in a one-way hash? Take the two pieces of public information (SSID and MAC), then hash and store the combined results. Since that's the same information that the mobile client would see, the mobile client can do the same operation to retrieve the location.
This prevents using the database for general prying.
The privacy concern is that Google is building a massive database of SSIDs -- this is not the same as your neighbors being able to see your SSID, this is a corporation with global reach.
The dumb thing of Google is that they're storing the SSIDs and MACs in plain view rather then hashing them and storing the results. If they were to hash the combination of the SSID and MAC together and use that for their lookups, nobody would care because you wouldn't be able to pull information for a specific MAC back out of the database unless you also knew the SSID.
(Basically using the SSID as the salt to hash the MAC. The mobile device already knows both pieces of information, so it can pass them along to Google for the lookup of "where am I?".)
It doesn't matter what port SSH is on. If an attacker is even remotely interested he'll run a port scan and find your SSH port soon enough.
Moving the port takes you off the attack lists of the attackers who are only going after the low-hanging fruit.
The difference in log file volume between leaving it on a default port and simply moving it elsewhere in the lower 1024 pots is easily 100:1 if not more. There are very few determined hackers, but hundreds or thousands more opportunistic hackers who are going after the easy targets.
It lets you spot the more serious threats more easily as they no longer blend in with the constant noise coming from port 22/tcp attempts.
(Criminals tend not to rob poor people much now, because, duh, they don't have any money.)
Nonsense.
Criminal activity almost always starts in one's comfort zone - which means victimizing people near to you. Or stealing from a store that you frequent and already know. Or committing a crime of opportunity when a situation presents itself.
Now, what proportion of street thieves and robbers live in poor areas?
It's only the more organized criminals who think ahead a bit and realize that they should commit crimes outside of their home turf.
Slashdot Mirror
Three 5.25" bays hold twelve 2.5" drives with a combined capacity of twelve TB.
Ick, ick, ick. So you're proposing to fit a case with a bunch of noisy, underperforming, low air volume 40mm fans? And not just 2, but 6? And you expect those fans to last for more then a few months before they start making even more noise?
At least the earlier linked 2.5" backplane uses a pair of 60mm fans. Which are going to be quieter and more likely to last. I'd bet they move enough air to keep those 8 drives cool as well, even in a warmer location.
The AI has been split up into layers, IIRC, with each opponent actually coming up with a strategy to victory based on personal preferences and game conditions.
This already happens a bit in Civ4:BtS (especially with BetterAI). There was a lot of work in 2009 by the modders on making the pacifist leaders more likely to pursue diplomatic victory or culture victory over military victory. There's weirdly named variables that handle that for each leader, and things to be tweaked in the XML or data files that could impact warlike or peacenik behavior.
The layering is new, as is the concept of an over-arching goal. It's something we saw a bit in various games this past decade though. So not a completely new concept. But any improvement to the Civ5 basic AI will be welcome, hopefully it plays as well out of the gate as the Civ4:BtS AI plays.
No, we just all spawned in our mom's basements and it's going to take at least 20 turns to find another civilization to communicate with.
Which touches deeply on pacing. One thing that Civ4 taught me is that you need to consider the # of turns before the game is won/last during the design phase. This comes into play in numerous ways:
- A player clicking "next" 50x in a row without changing anything or making a decision isn't having fun. They're just watching a movie, one frame at a time.
- Your map size and travel speed need to be balanced. The world needs to feel large enough for those who want something huge, but it shouldn't take 1/4 of the game turns to travel from one end to another. At the same time, if you can get from one end of a large game world to another in 3 turns, you've probably boosted travel speed too much.
- Consider how much micro-management has to be done each turn. Some players will complain if it takes more then 15 seconds to finish a turn, others want enough to do that it takes 15-30 minutes per turn.
My personal preference is a size/speed where I have to make strategic choices 15-30 turns in advance. Which is why I always ended up playing Marathon speed on larger maps and taking 1500-2500 turns to finish (20-40 hours of gameplay). A big war might take 20-40 turns to setup, and then 40-60 turns to execute.
The downside, is that at the beginning of the game, I'm spending a lot of time just clicking "next turn". My worker is busy, my city is busy, and my lone warrior is pretty much out of things to explore after turn 50.
Different maps, play as different civs, make sure you patch the AI with one of the AI mods to make it more aggressive or diplomatic and just better at waging war.
Try a leader that doesn't come of age until mid-late game. Turn off different win conditions and go for a space or diplo win instead of whichever way your normally win.
Play a larger map, with more civs. Which makes things much more difficult.
Turn on raging barbs, and laugh as 1/5 of the civs get smothered at birth due to the barbarian hordes. Laugh harder when it's your civ that gets destroyed.
GalCiv 2 is there to satisfy "Masters of Orion" hunger - not Civilization :).
Eh... the thing I hated about MOO2 towards the end was that once you got some of the top-end engine techs, your ships basically had infinite range and nearly infinite speed. So you really couldn't setup a proper defense as space basically became tiny and almost dimensionless.
I've tried to get into GalCiv 2 a few times - and I just can't do it. The flat galaxy, with a 2D playfield, and no bottlenecks is just too 1990s for me. GC2 Twilight of the Arnor is still sitting on my hard drive, gathering electronic dust.
Maybe they'll switch to an actual stellar topography in GC3 or GC4. Something like what MOO3 tried to do, with semi-3D galactic clusters of stars (they kept the map very flat to keep it simple), with starlanes and choke points, etc. I was really looking forward to MOO3 because it was going to re-introduce the concept that terrain matters and you can't just fly from one location to another in 3 turns.
Which also explains why I like Civ4 so much and why I play on very large Tectonics maps with complicated geography (lots of little inlets and unpassable mountain ranges).
I think the consensus was that Civ IV was a flop.
Only for the old fogey's who refused to learn new things.
Personally, I never got into the old Civ II/III games. The graphics were crude and I just didn't feel like doing a earth-based TBS (my preference at the time was either sci-fi setting or fantasy).
Civ IV, OTOH, had enough graphical and audio bling to suck me in. It's the first of the Civ series that played, and I greatly enjoyed both expansions (warlords and BtS). I still ended up modding it slightly to remove annoyances (the better UI mod and the AI improvement mods were a must).
I still dig out BtS occasionally and try out a Tectonics, 60% water map on one of the larger map sizes. Definitely worth the money that I paid and I'm looking forward to Civ V.
I prefer simply NoScript + FlashBlock. I don't care about ads that are well behaved and aren't scripted. I do care about ads that use JavaScript or Flash and act like temperamental two year olds hopped up on sugar.
Plus there's the whole issue of JavaScript/Flash constantly being used as an infection vector. So in the past few years it's become more about safety in blocking scripts then about blocking ads. I'm tired of cleaning off machines that were infected via ads or other JavaScript/Flash vectors.
One core is sufficient for 99% of office workstations that only run a browser and MS Office applications. Dual-core is a bit more snappy, but I'd rather spend an extra hundred bucks on an SSD for the O/S volume than a more-core processor.
Gods no. Have you ever spent time using equivalent machines, one with dual-core and one with single-core? The dual-core blows the single-core out of the water in terms of responsiveness. Quad-cores might be overkill for office use, but only until their prices drop.
And it's not like multi-core is expensive anymore. Hell, NewEgg only sells (2) single-core CPUs now ($36 for AMD, $40 for the Intel). In comparison there are (42) dual-core CPUs listed, and they start at about $50. That's a far cry from "save an extra hundred bucks".
Nowadays, I usually shop by a combination of thermal design envelope (i.e. look for a 65W CPU) combined with "what can I get for $80". And that number used to be $150 for the CPU. With quad-cores as low as $80 now, it won't be long before we'll be putting quads on the desktop. Hopefully something with a 45W or 65W design so that we can keep them quiet and cool. The current quads are 95W or 125W for the most part. I wish AMD still made their 45W CPU line, those were great for office machines.
If they can get the 150GB SSDs down below $100, I'll strongly consider switching all of our desktops over. Once you head to multi-core and have enough RAM, HD speeds become the biggest bottleneck.
hacking a server at a free E-mail provider and using accounts
Already happens - mostly with Hotmail, Yahoo, and GMail accounts.
My Hotmail account hacked - all my contacts spammed !! How to avoid it happening to you.
(just one of many such occurrences)
Oh, I wouldn't say that. A couple weeks ago I decided to upgrade my 8800GTS.
I'm in a similar boat, running an 8800 GT 512MB card that is getting long in the tooth.
The GTX 460 1GB looks like the successor to the old 8800GT 512MB. Lowish power draw, lowish noise and heat, but with excellent performance for about $200. I used to run a pair of 8800GT in SLI mode, but so much of my gaming is now done in windowed mode, with a 2nd monitor running that the SLI didn't get me anything. (SLI is disabled on the 8800GT if you have 2 monitors active.)
I'm still tempted by the GTX 465 1GB part... but will probably go with the GTX 460 1GB part instead in late summer.
Because as recent as around 5-10 years ago, when Google were a lot smaller incidentally, I can recall using web browsers (mainly IE) where it was getting almost impossible to browse anywhere without 8 or 9 pop-up windows appearing that advertised all manner of sexual and non-sexual services and products - nowadays it's an unobtrusive Google ad at the side of the page or maybe an Adobe Flash advert or two at the top or bottom.
Which has little to do with advertisers behaving better, and has a lot more to do with web browsers and users fighting back with pop-up blockers, NoScript, ad blockers, FlashBlock, etc.
If the browsers hadn't added those features, we'd still be dealing with lots and lots of pop-up and pop-under ads.
One of my computers had an intermittent failure in a RAM chip/line/something somewhere that mostly manifested as SHA/MD5 failures when I was checksumming large files that I'd downloaded. Never showed up in Memtest86, but eventually I eliminated every other possibility. IIRC, I solved it by underclocking the machine and then replacing it when I was able.
Try Prime95 next time if you're trying to track down intermittent errors like that with CPU/RAM.
(Those of us in the know have been using it for 10-15 years now, because it pegs the CPU at 100% and does very complex calculations with cross-checks that uses up lots and lots of memory.)
HTML5 will help change the Web, however, the true change that will come to the Web is finally when the Semantic Web will take off; unfortunately no one knows when or if it ever will.
The Semantic Web will never happen - until you solve the underlying problem that the person exerting all the effort to make it semantic reaps none of the benefits. People, on the whole, are lazy and will exert minimum effort.
Tags, categorization, metadata only get applied by a tiny subset of people creating content. And for the most part, that extra data only gets added if the author needs it in order to keep track or find older content. All of the rest of the content gets published willy-nilly with no attempt at metadata. If you're lucky, there will be some OCD person out there willing to categorize things for free, but you can't depend on that.
(Then there's the whole issue of people inputting false information into the system either out of maliciousness or fraud. Witness all of the nonsense that happens with the META keyword tag.)
Tapes are small, disposable, cheap, reliable. Hard drives are maybe 2 of those.
The media may be cheap, but the drives are expensive and sometimes proprietary. So you'd best be a big enough outfit to buy at least multiple drives. Not to mention that you need to replace tapes regularly. At $2000/drive and needing at least three, plus needing 60 tapes per year at $30ea... you could buy around 30-40 1TB hard drives, with carry cases or trays. And you need to lay out that $7500 right at the start, plus the $1800/year. That's a lot of money for a small business with under 20 employees.
(And most tape drives are more like $3k to $4k each.)
The big problem with tape for smaller shops is simply up-front cost. For $150, they can buy a single 1TB drive and use that to write backups to. Each week, they buy a new drive until they are rotating 5 or 6 of them. Or if they really need to get data offsite daily, they'll do a delta-backup over the WAN links. Or spend enough to have 10 hard drives in rotation.
(We use a mix of backup over WAN links nightly/weekly combined with taking hard drives offsite weekly.)
Actually, since semiconductor manufacturing gets cheaper practically exponentially (yay Moore's law) eventually SSD prices should catch up and undercut mechanical disk prices, just because of the manufacturing process. But that's a long ways off yet.
Well... maybe. NAND flash isn't too many generations away from hitting a lithography wall from what I remember. And we're still 10x-20x more expensive then magnetic media on a $/GB measurement. 2.5" laptop drives are in the 0.14-0.17 $/GB range, while SSDs are still up in the 1.36-2.34 $/GB range.
Assuming that we're already down in the 40-50nm(?) range for flash media, can they really manage to squeeze one more order of magnitude out of the feature sizes? (Closer to 3x smaller features since you double the bits at sqrt() feature size.) If they can make NAND flash down at 10-15nm, then yes we might see $/GB prices below $0.20.
25nm is apparently around the corner, so we might see a 2x-4x price improvement soon. The question is how much headroom is left after that.
Almost all of the "careers" in EVE are done by players for players (except for the mission runners), you can:
- be a mission runner for NPC corps, earning loyalty points and ISK (money), usually to fund other activities
- become a station trader where you attempt to buy (items) low and sell high
- manufacturer of basic modules & ships
- inventor of more advanced modules & ships (T2 or Tech II)
- become a courier, moving goods from A to B to fulfill contracts (usually player contracts)
- buy goods at far flung locations, haul them to where they can be more easily sold for a higher price
- mine rocks all day, sell the minerals or feed them into a production chain
- salvage wrecks, sell the results or use it to build stuff
- explore for hidden sites that may offer good loot or a chance to be sent on a wild-goose chase around the region for better loot
- setup player owned structures, in order to research blueprints to reduce waste or to create things without waiting on NPC research slots or NPC production slots to open up
- be a low-sec pirate where you camp gates, asteroid belts, stations and attempt to kill & loot or ransom other players for money
- live in a worm-hole, disconnected (mostly) from the main star systems (and do exploration / mining / research / manufacturing inside)
- spy for a corp/alliance, hunting down targets, or player owned structures, or industrial locations
- plant your flag out in null-sec and claim sovereignty over a set of systems, then defend that turf against other players
- be a low-sec pirate hunter, roaming low-security space looking for people with bad standings
- be a hi-sec mercenary, where corps hire you to declare war on their rivals, you get to disrupt their hi-sec operations for a week or more
- try your hand at corporate theft, where you gain the trust of a corp, then rob them blind
- scam other players out of ISK, ships, goods
- run a training corp and teach other players aspects of the game that you know well
- become a monopolist and attempt to control or influence all market activity in a particular sector
- setup a POS in orbit at a moon and harvest the resources
- do similar on planets with the new Planetary Interaction feature to produce basic goods used by players and manufacturing
- engage in small-scale PvP, or stealth bomber fleets, or large-scale cap-ship fights where 100v100 is a small engagement
EVE is very much "what do you bring to the table" rather then "here's content, go do it". The majority of it, you'll need acquaintances and contacts in order to complete missing parts of the system that you can't do alone. In my experience, it's a much more social game then WoW.
So I was surprised by the number of poster that do like them.
Try asking someone who's livelihood depends on accurate touch-typing, where your fingers always start properly aligned on the home row.
With a pointer nubby, I can keep my fingers on the home row and quickly bump the mouse to click on a stupid dialog or select some text. Without that, I have to take one hand all the way over to a separate mouse and spend 3x as long taking care of the dialog box.
Would I want to draw figures with it? Hell no. But in 99% of the times when I would normally reach for a mouse, I can quickly accomplish the same task with a light touch on the pointer nubby. (Helps if you set the mouse sensitivity setting to "extremely sensitive" so that you can use a very small touch on the nubby to cover large distances.)
It's the primary reason that I haven't bought a OS X laptop, even though it would be very nice. I can't stand trackpads, they're way too finicky.
Well, no IM system that people actually use shows each character as it is typed.
e/pop (a corporate IM solution from a few years back) used to have this feature.
(Naturally, as the admin, I disabled it.)
I keep my /etc in a git repository now.
/etc
Look at FSVS instead. It's designed for versioning Linux/Unix servers.
# cd
# fsvs ci -m "getting ready to change stuff"
# (change stuff)
# fsvs ci -m "changed stuff"
I keep entire servers (except for temp files and user data that gets backed up in another manner) versioned using FSVS. The repositories are stored on a 2nd machine and I can use other SVN tools to browse that repository and review changes.
And merging your changes to an old config file with the incoming one via etc-update? That was always a crapshoot. 90% of the time it would work fine. The other 10% something would break and require a few hours of digging around to fix it.
Google for FSVS, version your configuration files (or even the entire machine except for temp / sys / user files). And if you keep the repository on a 2nd machine, you can use any available SVN client tool to poke and prod to see what changed when the primary machine won't boot.
# fsvs ci -m "preparing to do things"
# (do some stuff)
# fsvs ci -m "did X, Y and Z while upgrading Q"
(uh oh)
Look at FSVS logs, look at FSVS diffs, fix what broke within a few minutes because you know exactly what changed during your update.
So why not make an effort to preserve privacy by storing the results in a one-way hash? Take the two pieces of public information (SSID and MAC), then hash and store the combined results. Since that's the same information that the mobile client would see, the mobile client can do the same operation to retrieve the location.
This prevents using the database for general prying.
The privacy concern is that Google is building a massive database of SSIDs -- this is not the same as your neighbors being able to see your SSID, this is a corporation with global reach.
The dumb thing of Google is that they're storing the SSIDs and MACs in plain view rather then hashing them and storing the results. If they were to hash the combination of the SSID and MAC together and use that for their lookups, nobody would care because you wouldn't be able to pull information for a specific MAC back out of the database unless you also knew the SSID.
(Basically using the SSID as the salt to hash the MAC. The mobile device already knows both pieces of information, so it can pass them along to Google for the lookup of "where am I?".)
It doesn't matter what port SSH is on. If an attacker is even remotely interested he'll run a port scan and find your SSH port soon enough.
Moving the port takes you off the attack lists of the attackers who are only going after the low-hanging fruit.
The difference in log file volume between leaving it on a default port and simply moving it elsewhere in the lower 1024 pots is easily 100:1 if not more. There are very few determined hackers, but hundreds or thousands more opportunistic hackers who are going after the easy targets.
It lets you spot the more serious threats more easily as they no longer blend in with the constant noise coming from port 22/tcp attempts.
See also David Brin's Earth where privacy is an outmoded concept and peepers (people with recording devices) are common.
Transmetropolitan is also a weird look at a possible future.
(Criminals tend not to rob poor people much now, because, duh, they don't have any money.)
Nonsense.
Criminal activity almost always starts in one's comfort zone - which means victimizing people near to you. Or stealing from a store that you frequent and already know. Or committing a crime of opportunity when a situation presents itself.
Now, what proportion of street thieves and robbers live in poor areas?
It's only the more organized criminals who think ahead a bit and realize that they should commit crimes outside of their home turf.