I completely agree with you about doing periodic restore drills onto spare boxes. I was just curious about what sort of removable media people were using for physical backups nowadays.
What medium do you recommend for a backup that is both offline and offsite? You need offline to guard against the Orain problem, but you need offsite to guard against natural disaster.
How would cloud backups survive deletion by the same attacker? Wiki hosting service Orain died when a malicious intruder deleted all of its hosted backups.
Nowadays the "warez sites" are public torrent sites (such as The Pirate Bay) and private trackers (for which I'll refer you to the essay on Install Gentoo).
there was a CAPTCHA that prevented me from logging in and placing my order. How stupid is that?
Some online stores require passing a CAPTCHA if they sell products that have a vibrant secondary market. Making automated mass buying harder for scalpers ostensibly helps get products in front of bona fide end users. One example is Ticketmaster, as ticket scalping increases cost for people attending a show without benefiting the performers. Another is Humble Store, as a warez group might have a bot watch the site for new releases, pay the minimum, and send the DRM-free games straight to the topsites.
When a video game is in the tens of gigabytes, 'not being wasteful' would involve shipping the game on physical media (instead of as a download) and planning for not being able to release ongoing updates, or at least releasing them as expansions sold separately. But with optical drives becoming less common on PCs, I don't see how that can be made practical. BD burners were never nearly as common as DVD burners were. Or am I missing something fundamental about allowing video games to bloat to tens of gigabytes in the first place?
On a 10 GB/mo plan, you can transfer only 80,000 Mbit per month without hitting punitive overages. 40 Mbps will finish that off in 2,000 seconds, or just over a half hour. What size plan were you envisioning?
My mobile operator in the U.S. doesn't limit anything. But they actually expect me to pay for what I use.
If the price of a computer game is $40 for the game itself and $250 for the data plan to download it at $10-$15 per GB, how do either game publishers or ISPs expect customers to afford that?
Why can't the first world also go back to subsistence farming?
As Opportunist mentioned, the population has grown past the carrying capacity of subsistence farming to a level that only high-yield farming methods can sustain. But even local farming to supplement high-yield farming is a non-starter so long as NIMBYs remain unwilling to repeal zoning ordinances that prohibit urban dwellers from running a victory garden. Consider Oak Park, Michigan, which dropped misdemeanor charges against Julie Bass only after the city's threat against her vegetable garden made national news.
Try checking to see if the carriers servicing your area offer fixed wireless service. Basically, it's an LTE hotspot designed to be used in one place
Verizon's LTE Internet (Installed) has what I would consider an unusably high cost per gigabyte. $80 ($10 for the line and $70 for the data plan) for the first 10 GB in each month and then $15 for each GB thereafter.
That depends to a large extent on what you include in "modern internet use". Turn on the tracking protection feature in the Firefox web browser, and a lot of data-heavy annoyances related to third-party snooptech on mostly textual websites will stop annoying you. If that isn't enough, the JavaScript Switcher extension lets you turn all scripts on and off for particular domains. Or you can use APK's solution of compiling and using a large DNS blocklist.
In case you weren't just making a pedantic joke about imprecise colloquial language:
Satellite Internet providers tend to pause the meter from midnight to 6 AM local time or thereabouts. This window is intended for subscribers to download operating system updates, purchased downloadable games, and the like, so that they move these activities out of the most congested periods of the day.
If you can have no caps at midnight you can have no caps 24/7.
How is this the case? Caps are at least ostensibly used for congestion control. It sounds perfectly reasonable for a carrier to run the meter only when the network is congested in order to shift bulk traffic to periods when the network is not congested.
the price of data distribution is miniscule
In the wired case, this is true. In the wireless case, not so much.
You might as well shut off my water after a litre.
DirectX gets you Windows and XBox One which is much more lucrative
That depends on the cost in time and money for Microsoft to approve your company for an Xbox One devkit and subsequently to approve your game. If you have to use revenue from the Windows edition to pay for the materials and certification charges for the Xbox One edition, then DirectX gets you only Windows on launch day. So with DirectX it's Windows, then a delay, then Xbox One; with Vulkan it's Windows, then a delay, then Nintendo Switch.
So why should I give up money now, so that I can have more when I am dead?
The pitch I've seen most often from AIG's kinetic-typography-driven TV commercials is that life insurance allows your children to complete their education at a trade school or four-year university despite your untimely death.
License a major proprietary engine ported to multiple platforms. Its name might start with "Un".
Or use Vulkan to target Windows and GNU/Linux on day 1, macOS after you've shaken out launch bugs, and Nintendo Switch after you're seeing enough revenue to cover the certification.
At the end of the day, the revenue model of web sites isn't my concern.
Until you are researching something, and you discover that one or more promising sites about that thing have ceased to exist because their revenue model disappeared.
I block ads and trackers, if this renders a site unusable (it rarely does), I'll go elsewhere.
Unless elsewhere has also become unusable, as has else-elsewhere. Now about that:
If eventually the web becomes even less usable, then I'll use it even less.
What will you then proceed to use instead of the web?
Slashdot Mirror
I completely agree with you about doing periodic restore drills onto spare boxes. I was just curious about what sort of removable media people were using for physical backups nowadays.
With data sets having outgrown DVD long ago, and BD-R never really catching on, what "removable media" are you referring to? Entire HDDs?
What medium do you recommend for a backup that is both offline and offsite? You need offline to guard against the Orain problem, but you need offsite to guard against natural disaster.
How would cloud backups survive deletion by the same attacker? Wiki hosting service Orain died when a malicious intruder deleted all of its hosted backups.
Nowadays the "warez sites" are public torrent sites (such as The Pirate Bay) and private trackers (for which I'll refer you to the essay on Install Gentoo).
there was a CAPTCHA that prevented me from logging in and placing my order. How stupid is that?
Some online stores require passing a CAPTCHA if they sell products that have a vibrant secondary market. Making automated mass buying harder for scalpers ostensibly helps get products in front of bona fide end users. One example is Ticketmaster, as ticket scalping increases cost for people attending a show without benefiting the performers. Another is Humble Store, as a warez group might have a bot watch the site for new releases, pay the minimum, and send the DRM-free games straight to the topsites.
WTF? Water is metered, not capped.
[...]
Overages quickly double your bill, of course.
To me, the fee structure of overages is a clear example of cellular data airtime being metered.
When a video game is in the tens of gigabytes, 'not being wasteful' would involve shipping the game on physical media (instead of as a download) and planning for not being able to release ongoing updates, or at least releasing them as expansions sold separately. But with optical drives becoming less common on PCs, I don't see how that can be made practical. BD burners were never nearly as common as DVD burners were. Or am I missing something fundamental about allowing video games to bloat to tens of gigabytes in the first place?
Seems to me that 40Mbps is plenty for most people
On a 10 GB/mo plan, you can transfer only 80,000 Mbit per month without hitting punitive overages. 40 Mbps will finish that off in 2,000 seconds, or just over a half hour. What size plan were you envisioning?
In the dial-up days, banks and the like didn't make heavily script-driven web applications that timed out if your connection was too slow.
My mobile operator in the U.S. doesn't limit anything. But they actually expect me to pay for what I use.
If the price of a computer game is $40 for the game itself and $250 for the data plan to download it at $10-$15 per GB, how do either game publishers or ISPs expect customers to afford that?
Why can't the first world also go back to subsistence farming?
As Opportunist mentioned, the population has grown past the carrying capacity of subsistence farming to a level that only high-yield farming methods can sustain. But even local farming to supplement high-yield farming is a non-starter so long as NIMBYs remain unwilling to repeal zoning ordinances that prohibit urban dwellers from running a victory garden. Consider Oak Park, Michigan, which dropped misdemeanor charges against Julie Bass only after the city's threat against her vegetable garden made national news.
Try checking to see if the carriers servicing your area offer fixed wireless service. Basically, it's an LTE hotspot designed to be used in one place
Verizon's LTE Internet (Installed) has what I would consider an unusably high cost per gigabyte. $80 ($10 for the line and $70 for the data plan) for the first 10 GB in each month and then $15 for each GB thereafter.
That depends to a large extent on what you include in "modern internet use". Turn on the tracking protection feature in the Firefox web browser, and a lot of data-heavy annoyances related to third-party snooptech on mostly textual websites will stop annoying you. If that isn't enough, the JavaScript Switcher extension lets you turn all scripts on and off for particular domains. Or you can use APK's solution of compiling and using a large DNS blocklist.
In case you weren't just making a pedantic joke about imprecise colloquial language:
Satellite Internet providers tend to pause the meter from midnight to 6 AM local time or thereabouts. This window is intended for subscribers to download operating system updates, purchased downloadable games, and the like, so that they move these activities out of the most congested periods of the day.
If you can have no caps at midnight you can have no caps 24/7.
How is this the case? Caps are at least ostensibly used for congestion control. It sounds perfectly reasonable for a carrier to run the meter only when the network is congested in order to shift bulk traffic to periods when the network is not congested.
the price of data distribution is miniscule
In the wired case, this is true. In the wireless case, not so much.
You might as well shut off my water after a litre.
Your water use is metered as well.
But I haven't seen evidence that the United States, subject of the featured article, is among them.
DirectX gets you Windows and XBox One which is much more lucrative
That depends on the cost in time and money for Microsoft to approve your company for an Xbox One devkit and subsequently to approve your game. If you have to use revenue from the Windows edition to pay for the materials and certification charges for the Xbox One edition, then DirectX gets you only Windows on launch day. So with DirectX it's Windows, then a delay, then Xbox One; with Vulkan it's Windows, then a delay, then Nintendo Switch.
As I understand it, it's not illegal to move to an area where you can commute without driving. No vehicle means no need for insurance.
So why should I give up money now, so that I can have more when I am dead?
The pitch I've seen most often from AIG's kinetic-typography-driven TV commercials is that life insurance allows your children to complete their education at a trade school or four-year university despite your untimely death.
License a major proprietary engine ported to multiple platforms. Its name might start with "Un".
Or use Vulkan to target Windows and GNU/Linux on day 1, macOS after you've shaken out launch bugs, and Nintendo Switch after you're seeing enough revenue to cover the certification.
Let me know when Three expands to other countries.
Where are preorder periods for PSIO announced, how often are they, and how long do they tend to last before selling out?
At the end of the day, the revenue model of web sites isn't my concern.
Until you are researching something, and you discover that one or more promising sites about that thing have ceased to exist because their revenue model disappeared.
I block ads and trackers, if this renders a site unusable (it rarely does), I'll go elsewhere.
Unless elsewhere has also become unusable, as has else-elsewhere. Now about that:
If eventually the web becomes even less usable, then I'll use it even less.
What will you then proceed to use instead of the web?
What provision of this bill, if any, applies any term extension to works other than pre-1972 sound recordings?