Unless your laptop is pushing the edge of what is possible a 32bit laptop is still going to be perfectly serviceable in 2008. Heck, that's why we stratified our users into "power", "average", "light" categories. We also make sure to absolutely max out the RAM that any laptop will support.
Power users get a new laptop every 2 years or so. Their old one gets reassigned to an average user and the average user's laptop gets handed off to a light user.
That "light" user's laptop can still handle basic document editing, e-mail and web browsing. Even though it's at least 4 years old (and usually closer to 5 years). Most of the light usage comes from people who work on a desktop at work, but want to be able to take a bit of work home over the weekend. They really don't care that it's an older and slower system. So laptops that we purchase today will probably still be in use in 2012.
As for your assertion that RAM needs will drive the conversion to 64bit, I agree. It's not difficult to order a system with 2GB of RAM nowadays (RAM is only $100/GB now, rather cheap.) And once 2GB systems are becoming common, that 4GB limit really starts to loom on the horizon.
AMD picked the right strategy for 32bit to 64bit. They made a 64bit capable CPU that still had great 32bit performance. That makes it a no-risk upgrade path. Even if you never run 64bit apps, you're future-proofed and you didn't give up any 32bit performance. (Unlike Intel's Itanium disaster.)
I do agree that most CPU chips will be 64bit capable in 2008. I doubt Intel will continue making 32bit chips past 2007.
Given the fact that Vista supposedly use CG and advanced graphics a lot, the guy wonders whether the 945M will be able to give you a "full vista experience" compared to a standalone graphic card.
And my question is still... what would possess a fellow to upgrade the Windows O/S on a laptop? There are no must-have features in Vista (nor were there for WinXP). These aren't Macs where it's cool to constantly upgrade to the latest version of OS X.
Things have slowed down a lot in the past few years. No longer does system performance double every 12-15 months. As long as you pack enough RAM in the system, these units can keep ticking for a long long time without feeling outdated.
We have numerous laptops that are 3-5 years old and still run WinXP/Win2k just fine. Mostly because we made sure to max out their memory configurations (either with 512MB or 1GB of RAM). Heck, my system is a 1GB Tecra that is from early 2002 and I still use it 12-15 hours a day.
The biggest killer is failing hardware. Warranties cover that for the first 3 years, after that we get them fixed as needed ($200-$400 per repair). Backlight fade is repairable and our users are pretty careful about not breaking optical drive trays or twisting the hinges off. Still, a $200 repair is worth the cost compared to replacing the entire laptop and spending the labor time to get the user up and running on a new system.
It probably also helps that we only bought Toshiba's business-class Tecras for the past few years. Their build quality and sturdiness is quite good. (We're switching to Thinkpads starting this year, however.) It doesn't pay to go cheap with laptops, they get too much abuse.
Actually, a new laptop will last quite a while. What I couldn't swallow was the idea that laptop users will upgrade their O/S. IOW, the whole 2nd part of the article was nothing more then fluff and FUD.
Laptops often use custom chipsets that require particular drivers. Often drivers that never get updated for comaptibility against newer O/S's. Upgrading the O/S in those cases becomes a fool's errand.
I'm still using a Toshiba Tecra from 2002 (4 years now). It has an upgraded hard drive and a full loadout of RAM (1GB). If I treat it well (and the backlight holds up), I could easily use it for another 3-4 years.
The only reasons that I'm considering upgrading:
- More RAM. I need more then 1GB of working memory (I'm constantly bumping up against the swap file most weeks). I can't put any more into this existing system. The Thinkpad T60s are supposed to support 2GB of RAM.
- Dual-core. The idea of dual-core in a laptop is extremely appealing. Better responsiveness is going to be the big winner. There are way too many times when system performance goes to hell on my existing laptop.
Mmm, I'm pretty sure PCI was always envisioned as a general-purpose slot rather then being dedicated to the graphics card.
We started with 8-bit ISA, later expanded to 16-bit ISA slots. Then EISA, MCA and VESA fought for a while (early 90s). PCI came out a bit after VESA (and pushed VESA out of the market). Then in mid-90s, Intel started to talk up the AGP slot as a dedicated graphics port. PCI-X showed up in the late 90s (maybe as late as 2000-2001?) and now PCIe.
I think AGP came out about 2 years after PCI. It was right about the time that all of the 3D graphics cards started hitting the mainstream. I still remember getting my head around having a "gaming" video card. Folks started to realize that they were bumping up against the limits of what PCI was capable of and that there needed to be a faster connection to the graphics card.
The oldest system that I have at the moment has (1) AGP, (3) PCI, and (3) 16-bit ISA slots. It's from c1997.
Absolutely, and if you don't understand something, read the comments. Chances are pretty good someone else didn't understand either and asked. Or if that hasn't happened, post the question yourself. That's why the comments section is here!
Heck, that's 90% of why I read Slashdot. Lightly filtered, somewhat useful comments from dozens or hundreds of individuals on whatever topic I'm trying to bone up on this week. (It's not my only source, but it often provides a good surface-level understanding of the topic. Enough to dig further into more detailed documentation.)
There's a lot of software that I probably heard about here first (PostgreSQL for one, anti-spam solutions, etc.).
We've had a rule blocking.pif,.scr, and about 20 other extensions on our mail server for close to 4 years now.
That's not to say that it couldn't piggyback in on a laptop or via another e-mail account (or inside a ZIP file). But at least we reject all of the ones that we see on the mail server.
Even as a developer, I'd be hard-pressed to say why.pif/.scr attachments shouldn't be blocked at the gateway.
That said, the prof might be a little out of his element (I have a hard time finding a "silver-haired professor" being a gamer of any means, although that is a generalization and I could be wrong), but his question is at least somewhat valid.
Hmmm, I regularly cross weapons with an 80-year old in an FPS game. Another player who is a regular is in his mid-50s. Heck, most of the players that I know of are in their 30s and 40s. The younger folks are just too excitable and get frustrated when their fast-twitch reflexes don't stand up to tactics, strategy and smart play.
Worst I had was adding 512KB to an AT-class (80286) machine. $12.50/chip and I needed 18 of them. So $450/MB or $406,800 for a full gigabyte of RAM. And that's in 1988 dollars.
And I thought EDO RAM was expensive ($640/GB in today's prices). That's 1994 technology (an old old Gateway computer).
Modern memory runs at around $100/GB in comparison.
Darn nice post, reminds me of the days when I worked for a large U.S. corporation. (I started as an engineer, until we took over the local I.S. department. Then things got better for a little while.)
It's a lot like dancing with an elephant, no matter how much you struggle, it's going to put it's feet where it wants.
Now I work for a small company and I basically am the IT staff. More memory for a workstation? Gladly. That $100 + install time means I have a machine that we can probably use for another few years (instead of spending $1200-1500 on a new system).
How can I protect my Mac, Windows and Linux servers from infected clients?
The same way you protect against any other threat of data corruption. Offline, generational backups.
Buy (3) USB/firewire drives. Backup to the first drive for a week. Swap it out for the second drive and use that drive for a week. Then swap out #2 for #3 and use that for a week. Go back to start.
Or you could use tape, or removable hard drive trays. No matter what you choose, the important feature is that your backup media be offline (not connected).
Realizing this is./ I fully expect to be laughed at here, but why do these submitters feel a need to place half-truths in their writeups to make MS look worse than it already does?
A1) Because if they don't, the editors will! (ba-da-bing!)
A2) It ensures that the supporters of technology X will get riled up and post numerous rebuttals!
A3) Sex sells, and controversy leads to more ad impressions for the submitter. (As well as for Slashdot's owners, but that leads us back into the first answer.)
I played from release up until last September. I haven't really paid attention to what's happened in the past few months.
The problem is that EQ2 suffers from a few structural defects.
1) Zone layout - Way back in the mists of time there were supposed to be boats and getting between the islands was supposed to involve a boat ride. As a result of this early design, all of the zones in EQ2 are mostly on separate islands. Then they took the boats out and added magic bells on all of the docks to allow you to click to get to another destination.
End result: The world feels tiny. There's no sense of vastness like you had in EQ1 where getting from Qeynos to Freeport was a 6-8 zone run that took a goodish amount of time. (30 minutes?) Worse, there's only one way to get from Qeynos to Freeport.
2) Too tightly scripted - Some of this has been addressed over time. Such as the removal of level-based zone access and the simplification of picking your end-class.
3) Too many quests, not enough journal space - It became a major chore to get quests complete in a group. Due to the limited size of the quest journal, you'd spend a few minutes at the start of a night just trying to figure out what quests you wanted to knock off just to free up some space in your journal. Instead of doing whatever came to mind, a lot of folks became slaves to the quest journal (or gave up on quests).
4) Quests that aren't group-friendly. The best example of this is the level 20 armor quests. Due to the way that the quests were structured, you couldn't start working on AQ #2 unless you had completed AQ #1. Which meant that unless you stayed in lockstep with your friends, they'd either have to wait for you to play again, or go back and help you fulfill the quest requirements. (Including having to take a break and run back to town.)
5) Poor zone design. Too many zones are laid out in a maze fashion with long dead-ends (Nek Forest, Zek). Others are more open and more enjoyable (Thundering Steppes, Antonica, Commonlands). Nektulos Forest in particular was excessively annoying because there are a lot of spots where you have to go all the way back to a main valley just to go 50 meters in a particular direction.
6) Buggy zones. Nektropos Castle, Zek Citadel are the two that come to mind. Both of these zones suffer from poor pathing or too much packed into too small of a space. (Nek Castle would've been much better if all the rooms were sized up about 33%.)
7) Constantly removing reasons to travel back to your home city. Instead of making it easier to get back home at the end of an adventure, the devs went the other direction. As a result, they emptied out the cities and made them wastelands.
Some of this stuff is fixable, but some of it requires a major overhaul of the entire gameworld (such as the geographic layout).
you'll be able to get a 500 terabyte drive in 2016
Not unless something bigger then perpendicular recording comes along. Today's GMR drives are roughly 60 gigabits / square inch, PR drives are shipping at 100-130 gigabits / square inch and are expected to top out at around 230-245 gigabits / square inch.
Which puts the upper limit at around 2TB in a 3.5" drive.
Anyone know what the next "big" thing is in magnetic storage? Or have they driven PR past the 245 gigabit / square inch level?
1998.08 - 12Gb/sq in
1999.08 - 26.5Gb/sq in
2000.10 - 60Gb/sq in
2002 - projected at 75Gbits/sq in
1 (square inch) = 6.4516 square centimeters
The Hitachi 7K400 series is only 62Gb/sq in. That's the 400GB drive that came out last fall (Sep 2005?). GMR was rumored to top out at around 80-100Gb/sq in, IIRC.
Perpendicular recording is supposed to give us up to 230 Gb/sq in or up to 245 Gb/sq in, depending on who you talk to. Seagate demonstrated 100Gb/sq in back in 2001-2002 (perpendicular recording technology) and have just started shipping drives with 100-130Gb/sq-in.
So, PR is roughly doubling the areal density over GMR out of the gate with the potential of 4x to 5x more density then GMR. That puts the limits at around 2TB for a single 3.5" drive and maybe 500GB for a 2.5" notebook drive.
Now that PR drives are finally shipping, I think we'll see them ratchet up the densities about as fast as GMR did. (Layman's opinion.) So there's a strong possibility that we'll see those 2TB 3.5" drives in a few years (2008?).
After that, they'll either have to improve PR more (unlikely?) or come up with the next big idea of how to pack more bits per square inch.
Personally, I outsource my mailservers (even though I have a static IP available). Fusemail's prices are decent enough and there are a few other providers out there who allow outbound.
Plus, having IMAP support is handy for those times when I'm not at my PC (or my PC is having "issues").
1) have an ISP that doesn't block obviously infected attachments.
Heck, even simply blocking all of the usual suspect attachment types (PIF, SCR, VBS, etc.) at the mail gateway is a big step forward.
Our company blocks about 20-25 different attachment types at the gateway, which means we have a drastically smaller exposure risk. It also means we're not soley dependent on anti-virus at the client level or users who are smart enough not to do something stupid.
Huh, I've never heard of the Bravia TV sets. But I do remember their older CRT-based TV sets having good tubes in them... but I can't recall the name anymore.
Playstation, Clio, Aibo, Qrio - those tags I recognize and have at least modest good feelings towards.
Then there's the rest of the Sony nonsense...
Memory Stick (incompatible for the sake of being incompatible with every other flash drive)
MiniDisc (cool tech, that missed it's market window due to stupid DRM decisions) ATRAC (which probably isn't Sony tech, but evidence that they don't understand the MP3 player market at all) Beta (Sony misread the amount of capacity required per tape to be accepted by the majority of users)
VAIO (cool laptops that are rumored to be easily broken)
No, I don't have a very high opinion of Sony anymore. And killing off the really neat projects like Aibo and Qrio isn't helping.
I still find it useful to have my.yahoo.com as my customized homepage. Most of my front page is dedicated to the newsfeeds, but I also make use of a lot of sidebar content (weather, stocks, etc). I also keep a small collection of bookmarks there.
Wonder when Google will get smart and setup something similar?
(And yes, I probably could get all this via RSS, but I've been using my.yahoo.com for quite a few years now. It works, no big reason to change, yet...)
We started using the Corporate version of Symantec a few years back. (Our previous A/V, installed before I came onboard, was McAfee... and we'd have to upgrade the workstations on a 1-by-1 basis every week.)
Overall, we've been mostly happy with it. It stays out of the way when configured properly and does a reasonably good job of updating. The big issue with v8 is that the clients get slaved to a single server for updates rather then talking to any server within the organization. So when we retire a server, we have to then go around and uninstall/reinstall all of the clients to change to a different managed server.
I had one virus (monkey-d or something) that would hide in memory such that the virus scan couldn't find it, though a scan would clean a floppy. As a result, if I found a disk with the virus, I had to clean it then immediately reboot, since even "dir"ing the disk would reinfect it.
Which, IIRC, is where the guideline of "cold boot from a known clean, write-protected diskette before disinfecting" came from. Some of the nastier ones were especially tenacious.
I used to keep floppy boot disks around that I knew were clean and had a fairly recent version of anti-virus software on them.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless your laptop is pushing the edge of what is possible a 32bit laptop is still going to be perfectly serviceable in 2008. Heck, that's why we stratified our users into "power", "average", "light" categories. We also make sure to absolutely max out the RAM that any laptop will support.
Power users get a new laptop every 2 years or so. Their old one gets reassigned to an average user and the average user's laptop gets handed off to a light user.
That "light" user's laptop can still handle basic document editing, e-mail and web browsing. Even though it's at least 4 years old (and usually closer to 5 years). Most of the light usage comes from people who work on a desktop at work, but want to be able to take a bit of work home over the weekend. They really don't care that it's an older and slower system. So laptops that we purchase today will probably still be in use in 2012.
As for your assertion that RAM needs will drive the conversion to 64bit, I agree. It's not difficult to order a system with 2GB of RAM nowadays (RAM is only $100/GB now, rather cheap.) And once 2GB systems are becoming common, that 4GB limit really starts to loom on the horizon.
AMD picked the right strategy for 32bit to 64bit. They made a 64bit capable CPU that still had great 32bit performance. That makes it a no-risk upgrade path. Even if you never run 64bit apps, you're future-proofed and you didn't give up any 32bit performance. (Unlike Intel's Itanium disaster.)
I do agree that most CPU chips will be 64bit capable in 2008. I doubt Intel will continue making 32bit chips past 2007.
Given the fact that Vista supposedly use CG and advanced graphics a lot, the guy wonders whether the 945M will be able to give you a "full vista experience" compared to a standalone graphic card.
And my question is still... what would possess a fellow to upgrade the Windows O/S on a laptop? There are no must-have features in Vista (nor were there for WinXP). These aren't Macs where it's cool to constantly upgrade to the latest version of OS X.
Things have slowed down a lot in the past few years. No longer does system performance double every 12-15 months. As long as you pack enough RAM in the system, these units can keep ticking for a long long time without feeling outdated.
We have numerous laptops that are 3-5 years old and still run WinXP/Win2k just fine. Mostly because we made sure to max out their memory configurations (either with 512MB or 1GB of RAM). Heck, my system is a 1GB Tecra that is from early 2002 and I still use it 12-15 hours a day.
The biggest killer is failing hardware. Warranties cover that for the first 3 years, after that we get them fixed as needed ($200-$400 per repair). Backlight fade is repairable and our users are pretty careful about not breaking optical drive trays or twisting the hinges off. Still, a $200 repair is worth the cost compared to replacing the entire laptop and spending the labor time to get the user up and running on a new system.
It probably also helps that we only bought Toshiba's business-class Tecras for the past few years. Their build quality and sturdiness is quite good. (We're switching to Thinkpads starting this year, however.) It doesn't pay to go cheap with laptops, they get too much abuse.
Actually, a new laptop will last quite a while. What I couldn't swallow was the idea that laptop users will upgrade their O/S. IOW, the whole 2nd part of the article was nothing more then fluff and FUD.
Laptops often use custom chipsets that require particular drivers. Often drivers that never get updated for comaptibility against newer O/S's. Upgrading the O/S in those cases becomes a fool's errand.
I'm still using a Toshiba Tecra from 2002 (4 years now). It has an upgraded hard drive and a full loadout of RAM (1GB). If I treat it well (and the backlight holds up), I could easily use it for another 3-4 years.
The only reasons that I'm considering upgrading:
- More RAM. I need more then 1GB of working memory (I'm constantly bumping up against the swap file most weeks). I can't put any more into this existing system. The Thinkpad T60s are supposed to support 2GB of RAM.
- Dual-core. The idea of dual-core in a laptop is extremely appealing. Better responsiveness is going to be the big winner. There are way too many times when system performance goes to hell on my existing laptop.
Mmm, I'm pretty sure PCI was always envisioned as a general-purpose slot rather then being dedicated to the graphics card.
We started with 8-bit ISA, later expanded to 16-bit ISA slots. Then EISA, MCA and VESA fought for a while (early 90s). PCI came out a bit after VESA (and pushed VESA out of the market). Then in mid-90s, Intel started to talk up the AGP slot as a dedicated graphics port. PCI-X showed up in the late 90s (maybe as late as 2000-2001?) and now PCIe.
I think AGP came out about 2 years after PCI. It was right about the time that all of the 3D graphics cards started hitting the mainstream. I still remember getting my head around having a "gaming" video card. Folks started to realize that they were bumping up against the limits of what PCI was capable of and that there needed to be a faster connection to the graphics card.
The oldest system that I have at the moment has (1) AGP, (3) PCI, and (3) 16-bit ISA slots. It's from c1997.
Absolutely, and if you don't understand something, read the comments. Chances are pretty good someone else didn't understand either and asked. Or if that hasn't happened, post the question yourself. That's why the comments section is here!
Heck, that's 90% of why I read Slashdot. Lightly filtered, somewhat useful comments from dozens or hundreds of individuals on whatever topic I'm trying to bone up on this week. (It's not my only source, but it often provides a good surface-level understanding of the topic. Enough to dig further into more detailed documentation.)
There's a lot of software that I probably heard about here first (PostgreSQL for one, anti-spam solutions, etc.).
We've had a rule blocking .pif, .scr, and about 20 other extensions on our mail server for close to 4 years now.
.pif/.scr attachments shouldn't be blocked at the gateway.
That's not to say that it couldn't piggyback in on a laptop or via another e-mail account (or inside a ZIP file). But at least we reject all of the ones that we see on the mail server.
Even as a developer, I'd be hard-pressed to say why
That said, the prof might be a little out of his element (I have a hard time finding a "silver-haired professor" being a gamer of any means, although that is a generalization and I could be wrong), but his question is at least somewhat valid.
Hmmm, I regularly cross weapons with an 80-year old in an FPS game. Another player who is a regular is in his mid-50s. Heck, most of the players that I know of are in their 30s and 40s. The younger folks are just too excitable and get frustrated when their fast-twitch reflexes don't stand up to tactics, strategy and smart play.
Worst I had was adding 512KB to an AT-class (80286) machine. $12.50/chip and I needed 18 of them. So $450/MB or $406,800 for a full gigabyte of RAM. And that's in 1988 dollars.
And I thought EDO RAM was expensive ($640/GB in today's prices). That's 1994 technology (an old old Gateway computer).
Modern memory runs at around $100/GB in comparison.
Darn nice post, reminds me of the days when I worked for a large U.S. corporation. (I started as an engineer, until we took over the local I.S. department. Then things got better for a little while.)
It's a lot like dancing with an elephant, no matter how much you struggle, it's going to put it's feet where it wants.
Now I work for a small company and I basically am the IT staff. More memory for a workstation? Gladly. That $100 + install time means I have a machine that we can probably use for another few years (instead of spending $1200-1500 on a new system).
How can I protect my Mac, Windows and Linux servers from infected clients?
The same way you protect against any other threat of data corruption. Offline, generational backups.
Buy (3) USB/firewire drives. Backup to the first drive for a week. Swap it out for the second drive and use that drive for a week. Then swap out #2 for #3 and use that for a week. Go back to start.
Or you could use tape, or removable hard drive trays. No matter what you choose, the important feature is that your backup media be offline (not connected).
(Sounds like a perfect "Ask Slashdot" question!)
./ I fully expect to be laughed at here, but why do these submitters feel a need to place half-truths in their writeups to make MS look worse than it already does?
Realizing this is
A1) Because if they don't, the editors will! (ba-da-bing!)
A2) It ensures that the supporters of technology X will get riled up and post numerous rebuttals!
A3) Sex sells, and controversy leads to more ad impressions for the submitter. (As well as for Slashdot's owners, but that leads us back into the first answer.)
Figured I'd toss another log on the ol' bonfire.
I played from release up until last September. I haven't really paid attention to what's happened in the past few months.
The problem is that EQ2 suffers from a few structural defects.
1) Zone layout - Way back in the mists of time there were supposed to be boats and getting between the islands was supposed to involve a boat ride. As a result of this early design, all of the zones in EQ2 are mostly on separate islands. Then they took the boats out and added magic bells on all of the docks to allow you to click to get to another destination.
End result: The world feels tiny. There's no sense of vastness like you had in EQ1 where getting from Qeynos to Freeport was a 6-8 zone run that took a goodish amount of time. (30 minutes?) Worse, there's only one way to get from Qeynos to Freeport.
2) Too tightly scripted - Some of this has been addressed over time. Such as the removal of level-based zone access and the simplification of picking your end-class.
3) Too many quests, not enough journal space - It became a major chore to get quests complete in a group. Due to the limited size of the quest journal, you'd spend a few minutes at the start of a night just trying to figure out what quests you wanted to knock off just to free up some space in your journal. Instead of doing whatever came to mind, a lot of folks became slaves to the quest journal (or gave up on quests).
4) Quests that aren't group-friendly. The best example of this is the level 20 armor quests. Due to the way that the quests were structured, you couldn't start working on AQ #2 unless you had completed AQ #1. Which meant that unless you stayed in lockstep with your friends, they'd either have to wait for you to play again, or go back and help you fulfill the quest requirements. (Including having to take a break and run back to town.)
5) Poor zone design. Too many zones are laid out in a maze fashion with long dead-ends (Nek Forest, Zek). Others are more open and more enjoyable (Thundering Steppes, Antonica, Commonlands). Nektulos Forest in particular was excessively annoying because there are a lot of spots where you have to go all the way back to a main valley just to go 50 meters in a particular direction.
6) Buggy zones. Nektropos Castle, Zek Citadel are the two that come to mind. Both of these zones suffer from poor pathing or too much packed into too small of a space. (Nek Castle would've been much better if all the rooms were sized up about 33%.)
7) Constantly removing reasons to travel back to your home city. Instead of making it easier to get back home at the end of an adventure, the devs went the other direction. As a result, they emptied out the cities and made them wastelands.
Some of this stuff is fixable, but some of it requires a major overhaul of the entire gameworld (such as the geographic layout).
you'll be able to get a 500 terabyte drive in 2016
Not unless something bigger then perpendicular recording comes along. Today's GMR drives are roughly 60 gigabits / square inch, PR drives are shipping at 100-130 gigabits / square inch and are expected to top out at around 230-245 gigabits / square inch.
Which puts the upper limit at around 2TB in a 3.5" drive.
Anyone know what the next "big" thing is in magnetic storage? Or have they driven PR past the 245 gigabit / square inch level?
Unfortunately, that paper only covers 1998-2000.
A few data points from that paper...
1998.08 - 12Gb/sq in
1999.08 - 26.5Gb/sq in
2000.10 - 60Gb/sq in
2002 - projected at 75Gbits/sq in
1 (square inch) = 6.4516 square centimeters
The Hitachi 7K400 series is only 62Gb/sq in. That's the 400GB drive that came out last fall (Sep 2005?). GMR was rumored to top out at around 80-100Gb/sq in, IIRC.
Perpendicular recording is supposed to give us up to 230 Gb/sq in or up to 245 Gb/sq in, depending on who you talk to. Seagate demonstrated 100Gb/sq in back in 2001-2002 (perpendicular recording technology) and have just started shipping drives with 100-130Gb/sq-in.
So, PR is roughly doubling the areal density over GMR out of the gate with the potential of 4x to 5x more density then GMR. That puts the limits at around 2TB for a single 3.5" drive and maybe 500GB for a 2.5" notebook drive.
Now that PR drives are finally shipping, I think we'll see them ratchet up the densities about as fast as GMR did. (Layman's opinion.) So there's a strong possibility that we'll see those 2TB 3.5" drives in a few years (2008?).
After that, they'll either have to improve PR more (unlikely?) or come up with the next big idea of how to pack more bits per square inch.
Personally, I outsource my mailservers (even though I have a static IP available). Fusemail's prices are decent enough and there are a few other providers out there who allow outbound.
Plus, having IMAP support is handy for those times when I'm not at my PC (or my PC is having "issues").
1) have an ISP that doesn't block obviously infected attachments.
Heck, even simply blocking all of the usual suspect attachment types (PIF, SCR, VBS, etc.) at the mail gateway is a big step forward.
Our company blocks about 20-25 different attachment types at the gateway, which means we have a drastically smaller exposure risk. It also means we're not soley dependent on anti-virus at the client level or users who are smart enough not to do something stupid.
On the flip side, more drives = more power usage (and probably more heat?).
Compromises aplenty when building RAID arrays. Performance, heat, power usage, noise, cost... etc.
USENET: alt.comp.hardware.amd.x86-64
Huh, I've never heard of the Bravia TV sets. But I do remember their older CRT-based TV sets having good tubes in them... but I can't recall the name anymore.
Playstation, Clio, Aibo, Qrio - those tags I recognize and have at least modest good feelings towards.
Then there's the rest of the Sony nonsense...
Memory Stick (incompatible for the sake of being incompatible with every other flash drive)
MiniDisc (cool tech, that missed it's market window due to stupid DRM decisions)
ATRAC (which probably isn't Sony tech, but evidence that they don't understand the MP3 player market at all)
Beta (Sony misread the amount of capacity required per tape to be accepted by the majority of users)
VAIO (cool laptops that are rumored to be easily broken)
No, I don't have a very high opinion of Sony anymore. And killing off the really neat projects like Aibo and Qrio isn't helping.
Bless you for that story... (shudder).
As if I needed another reason to avoid fast-food joints.
GUComics - Booth Babes
I still find it useful to have my.yahoo.com as my customized homepage. Most of my front page is dedicated to the newsfeeds, but I also make use of a lot of sidebar content (weather, stocks, etc). I also keep a small collection of bookmarks there. Wonder when Google will get smart and setup something similar? (And yes, I probably could get all this via RSS, but I've been using my.yahoo.com for quite a few years now. It works, no big reason to change, yet...)
We started using the Corporate version of Symantec a few years back. (Our previous A/V, installed before I came onboard, was McAfee... and we'd have to upgrade the workstations on a 1-by-1 basis every week.)
Overall, we've been mostly happy with it. It stays out of the way when configured properly and does a reasonably good job of updating. The big issue with v8 is that the clients get slaved to a single server for updates rather then talking to any server within the organization. So when we retire a server, we have to then go around and uninstall/reinstall all of the clients to change to a different managed server.
I had one virus (monkey-d or something) that would hide in memory such that the virus scan couldn't find it, though a scan would clean a floppy. As a result, if I found a disk with the virus, I had to clean it then immediately reboot, since even "dir"ing the disk would reinfect it.
Which, IIRC, is where the guideline of "cold boot from a known clean, write-protected diskette before disinfecting" came from. Some of the nastier ones were especially tenacious.
I used to keep floppy boot disks around that I knew were clean and had a fairly recent version of anti-virus software on them.