Bit Torrent download - 45ish meg art of the sabre movie in 4 minutes 6 seconds via cable modem. My hardware firewall is making it difficult for me to serve back more than one or two uploads at a time, but this is so cool I'll probably leave BT running another hour or so. I have it set for unlimited upload, but for some reason it seems to top out at around 30kB/s and 2 or 3 connections. Download speed was in the neighborhood of 300kB/s. Just amazing, it's like the slashdot effect in reverse.
I wonder - Could something like BT be used for web sites? That way the more people hit a site, the faster it loads? A browser plugin for entire web pages instead of one file like the current BT?
Uh.... someone patent it quick before MS or SCO reads this!
Set usage policy with a fee/penalty structure, and hold them to it. Ignorance of consequences is no excuse for filling the server with logfiles.
Charge the security consulting firm with your downtime expenses too... They may refuse to pay, but simply getting the invoice may make them think twice about doing that to you again.
Another interesting thing is that while a lot of the comm/computer work done in the military is pure nuts and bolts stuff, things like basic connectivity, network access, email, server capacity, etc, in many cases they are running these basic services across a trillion dollar hardware infrastructure that you won't see in the civilian world for years. The average military user/client/customer wants basic network service, they want it now, and they want it even when in the middle of a desert or jungle or ocean. That is challenging and can be quite interesting and entertaining especially when your office can't afford to order a $100 hard drive, but when someone drops a 2 million dollar antenna, you just pull a spare out of the closet and hook it up... Or when your command authority decides to firewall a range of ports because AIM or napster uses them, never understanding the fact that the program that tracks and centrally logs flight hours for all military aircraft also needs those ports, so suddenly billions of dollars of money spent on flying operations can't be accounted for until every single unit in the military pushes through a waiver allowing them to punch through the firewall again.
It's an interesting and occasionally frustrating mix of the fantastically cool and unbelieveably stupid/inane. A tech's ability to function under those circumstances is a definate PLUS when they're looking for a job after getting out of the military.
In the Communications/Computer career fields in the military, you can get a lot of experience but don't get paid crap unless you stick around for 20 years. Even then, a 20 year enlisted troop makes less per year than a 4 year officer. As civilians, that enlisted troop would probably make double or triple what the officer could make based on the hands-on experience each would have gained, but military pay is based on rank and selective retention bonuses for undermanned fields, not actual job skills or qualifications.
The hassles are similiar to the civilian world (boss calling at midnight on Sunday during a scheduled server upgrade demanding that her email be turned back on immediately, idiot users causing trojan/virus infestations, etc) plus the added bonus of deploying to places where you can get shot at. On the gripping hand, if you're not lined up for another job and have some bills to pay, a 4 year stint in the military can be a good place to grab a bunch of experience.
My advice if you're going to join the military - take the student loans, finish your degree, and go in as an officer. The difference in pay and personal freedom is worth almost any amount of suffering required to get that degree BEFORE seeing the recruiter. The hiring rate for ex-military personnel has been high for a fairly long time now and doesn't show any signs of weakening either.
I remember when I got the first myst... I had just finished a couple of upgrades (cyrix drx2 cpu and a blazing fast 2x cdrom!) and got MYST to try everything out. I started playing at 10pm and had finished the entire game at 6am the next morning. Even though each puzzle had the same format, requiring you to visit 3 sites in each area to get info and then plug that info into the machinery in other areas, I remained fascinated through the entire marathon session.
The toughest part of MYST was where you had to listen to the sounds to determine which direction to go in the tunnels. Keying in on the sounds took almost 30 minutes, but since I knew the info was there, it didn't stop me entirely. I took approximately 6 full pages of notes and copied down the keys for every puzzle after I figured out the first one and saw that I'd need a way to remember reasonably complex information. The first puzzle probably took 2 hours but the rest came faster as I got used to the puzzle format and navigating around.
On the other hand, I spent a month with Riven, found every area, and never did solve a single puzzle (as far as I know). I managed to drain the big dome once but with everything else, I never did figure out which ones were important and which ones were just toys. Like the button that called in the sea creature to the underwater window... Never figured out what the hell that was for. And the valves in the lagoon near where you put the little metal pea into the cage and lowered it. I spent 2 full weeks there, an hour or two a day plus 5 hrs each weekend, and never managed to get anything useful from there.
I just couldn't find any PATTERNS that applied anywhere else in the Riven world. Frustrating. I had a map drawn of every area I went to, found some things by accident but couldn't duplicate them (knife fell out of the lever once) but I never connected even a single link other than how to get from one area to another. The little window looking thing with the three buttons that raised and lowered... I once did something random that let me see something in the viewport, but pushed the wrong three-button code and 2 hours later didn't have any idea what, if anything, I'd accomplished. I even bought the cheat guide but never read it because I was too ashamed. I must have spent 6 months in that game and felt like I had accomplished nothing. I suppose if I actually read the cheat guide it all would have been amazingly simple once I learned the system, but I was unable to find the relationships between each area, machine, gadget, and creature.
If you put a sheet of this stuff on your shoes, can you skate on concrete or climb up walls without moving your feet?
How about a pad of this stuff you could drive your car onto, then apply the current to have your car creep sideways. Would be great for repositioning your car in your garage.
No more roller-ball conveyer belts, just a sheet of this stuff.
Think about a bodysuit made of it. Ridges out = you can slither around like a snake without effort. Ridges in, and it could be hooked up to a computer for a full body sensory feedback from your favorite games.
But it IS a viable business model. Telemarketing is highly profitable, scalable, and startups have a relatively low overhead.
The fact that it's annoying as hell to those who have even a tiny amount of control against impulse buying does not invalidate the business model, it is merely a barrier that can be planned for.
And a lot of people use their "private personal LANs" for home businesses. Every one here who wrote their computer off as a business expense would run the risk of, if audited, having to pay more taxes on equipment they already paid tax on. How many taxes have already been paid? How about sales tax, import tariffs on foreign produced equipment, communications taxes on their internet connection, taxes on the electricity used to run the equipment, plus they're paying property tax on the building housing the equipment.
Are they going to count the little ones and zeros and somehow prove they're being used for business? What about a dual-use (personal/business) network? Do you, as a homeowner, bill yourself as a business owner, for network usage time? Is the tax rate based on the percentage of use, depreciated on a timeline based on calendar days or billed minutes? Will homeowners need to install 1 and 0 counters, with a bogotax bit set in the ip headers so the equipment knows what electrons are taxable?
Pah. If the people start obeying laws, the only way to hold a stick over their heads is to make more laws that makes everyone a potential criminal. The fear keeps people in line.
5 computers, 5 802.11b cards, one base station... plus 5 separate SSIDs and WEP keys in use. Prove I have a lan beeyatch! Maybe they want to tax my wireless phone 'cause it's using 2.4 ghz? Or does my 900mhz wireless speaker setup count too because sometimes I can hear it on my old 900mhz phone?
If I use my neighbor's 802.11b access point, do they tax me or him?
At least they're at work though, not on the run like the Texas democrats. I'd rather pay a politician to sit in his office and think up stoopid laws than pay them to run away to Oklahoma and say "nayah nayah nayah!" I think I'd get fired if I made my boss send out the cops to chase me around.
Exclude SCO right in the license. Put in a line that forbids compilation, distribution, modification, and all other use by SCO management, in SCO products, and on SCO-based machines.
My mistake for being snippy in my comment, sorry. I should probably leave editorial comments about other people's web sites to the professionals. When I saw that link I had a micro-flashback to a site that got slashdotted a few weeks ago that put up some rather sarcastic commentary/flamage about slashdot, and I made an incorrect assumption.
Mea culpa. Thanks for keeping your site up. It's a great resource to protect everyone from companies who are trying to hide the fact that they're deliberately selling damaged goods.
Has anyone else noticed that under the "kitchen sink" page down by the assorted links section, slashdot is linked with the tag "News for Nerds Nothing matters"
It's essentially the same thing. The accuracy is degraded by offsetting the clock just a little bit. We're talking errors of only miliseconds here so you can still set your watch by GPS, but it's enough to throw in an uncertainty volume into the computed position. Remember that the position is actually calculated by the GPS device through the differences in received timestamps (simple version of how it works).
Browsing through my firewall logs, a simple "file://attackeripaddy" in a browser window results in around 80% success using either no username/password, or a simple "guest" username with no password. On occasion, I'll have to throw a "C$" on the end (file://attackeripaddy/c$) but that's only necessary with fools running winNT or winXP instead of win9x. Sometimes it's even obvious that the people with compromised and unsecured computers are spammers...
Banging on my firewall then leaving their own computer open is arguably an invitation to come on in and look around. Leaving a guest account open is a clear invitation to come on in and look around just like having anonymous ftp available is an invitation to enter and at the very least look around. They're both file servers, both well known and documented...
Lock that 80% out of the internet, or even slap them upside the head temporarily, and 80% of the computers whacking away at my firewall will stop. That doesn't sound like a bad thing to me. Stupid/ignorant people who let their computer get used as a DDOS or other worm/trojan client through a basic lack of care don't get any pity from me.
Wouldn't something like this make public terminals more useful?
5 GB of encrypted data is more than enough to store a complete desktop workspace and even if it's not durable enough to put in a wallet, it IS small enough for a shirt or front pocket. The ideal companion software for this device would be an operating system utility to dump your entire workspace onto the card so you can set up anywhere anytime without worrying about setup hassles or security. The article mentions onboard encryption so even losing the device wouldn't be an immediate loss or compromise of your workspace property.
At my work, we have a network infrastructure problem so our system admins won't give us roaming profiles even though the nature of our business means that we don't always work at our own desks. A 5-10 meg profile doesn't seem that large, but in our case (old building, old/clunky LAN) it's too much to shove over the network each time we log on, so we have to manually set up a user profile on each computer. An encrypted card with our workspace and profile on it might make for a tidy solution and reduce network load even when we finally get our new LAN up and running someday, because we could take that card and load our profile anywhere even when away from the home office.
It would need OS support and reasonably cheap hardware and you can't count on Microsoft to play ball unless they thought of it first, but the potential seems obvious.
Those AV styled cases are even more expensive due to the fact that you'd have to buy new hardware to fit inside it. My multimedia box next to my TV is ready to go into a new, nicer looking case, except that it uses a full ATX motherboard. I'm willing to spend some coin on a new case, but I'm not willing to change the hardware configuration from a known-good setup just to fit into a new case. If I'm going to do that, I might as well buy a prebuilt or bare-bones setup like those nice little shuttle mini systems.
The aircraft checklists I've been using for the last few years are no longer printed on paper, rather a material that sounds just like this. It can be written on, is slightly flame resistant, is water and oil resistant, and it tears/cuts like plastic (stretches unless you cut it first.)
We've probably saved a few million bucks going to this stuff in addition to saving trees and not having to buy hundreds of thousands of plastic page protectors that we used to need. Except for not being able to use it for toilet paper in extreme cases of airborn intestinal distress (ewww), I haven't found any drawbacks to the stuff.
You're missing the idea that many (most?) RAID 0 setups use 2 identical drives. My RAID controller documentation specifically indicated 2 issues regarding the drives used. First, it indicated that performance would suffer if two different drives would be used. Not MIGHT, but WOULD. Second, it said that if drives of two different sizes were used, the total capacity would be twice the size of the smaller drive.
Based on those two issues, it seems reasonable to think that many (most?) people making RAID 0 arrays would use two identical drives. I know I did in my RAID 0 setup.
I built a Pentium 3 gaming system from almost the ground up and decided as games seem to be having longer and longer load times, I'd get an ABIT motherboard(SA6R) with highpoint raid onboard. I matched it with 2 40gig IBM drives (the ones that don't suck) and the speedup in desktop response time even in non-gaming tasks was immediately noticable. To help offset the statistically halved reliability, I have the drives mounted in a cage with 2 case fans blowing cool air over them.
That motherboard died slowly as the capacitors blew out one by one, but it didn't kill the RAID array. Since I didn't have a full backup of the entire volume, I replaced the motherboard with another ABIT motherboard (KR7A) using the next edition of the same highpoint controller, but using an Athlon CPU this time. The RAID volume was fortunately recognized immediately, however the old windows install was unrecoverable because I never could convince windows98SE setup that I was now using a VIA chipset instead of the Intel 815. I ended up deleting the windows directory, re-installing windows, and then re-installing all my software over the old installations which saved all of my data and most of my non-registry application settings. This process was reasonably quick due to the high speed of the drives.
On the VIA chipset motherboard the RAID array is slightly slower than on the Intel board, however VIA released a driver that recovered most of the RAID speed. It's still easily the fastest responsing computer in the house out of 4 systems, primarily due to the hard drive speed.
I don't recommend RAID 0 for anyone but the hard-core hardware tweakers because the potential for rather amazing difficulties is rather high. If the motherboard dies, I will lose the array if I can't find another motherboard or controller card that recognizes the existing array format. That's easy now, but might not be easy next week or next year. Add double the statistical failure rate on top of that (remember I'm running IBM drives, ugh), and it's definately not a solution for a system that must be reliable with quick failure recovery times.
The RAID array also makes overclocking somewhat more of a gamble. I nearly doubled my disk score under PCMark2002 with a mere 3 mhz FSB overclock, however the system also became slightly unstable and I couldn't tell if it was bad memory or the drive subsystem becoming flaky at the increased speed. Some hard drives and drive controllers are notorious for being finicky about running at higher speeds, and I've read that IBM drives in particular do not tolerate PCI bus speeds much over standard.
It sure is fast though, enough so that I don't have anything but the video card overclocked. 20-30 day uptimes on a win98SE gaming rig speaks for itself. That's horrible compared to linux, but it's outstanding for a win9x gaming rig.
I haven't had the time to try Linux on this machine and since it's both my game rig and daily-use machine and the games I play (flightsims and driving sims) don't run all that well under linux, and I don't feel like dual-booting my main rig. I run it 24/7 and in 2 years I've lost one power supply, one 80mm case fan, and one stick of DDR memory in addition to the failed ABIT motherboard. Speed is great, reliable speed takes careful parts selection.
The phrase "most resourceful" in the article is a rather thin disguise. The author is trying to say "Sony's best customers are also the ones most capable of becoming cheating bastards with the potential to ruin the game for the wider and less technically adept player pool."
Hacking the protocol is great, nothing wrong with that. Actually USING the hack during public gameplay is cheating, plain and simple. I personally don't think it's something the courts should have to deal with, but it's still a game exploit and rampant cheating has ruined more than one online game in the past. Sony has every right AND THE OBLIGATION TO IT'S NON-CHEATING USERS to do whatever it can to hamper efforts to use game cracks/hacks/whatever to gain an unfair advantage over other players.
That said, Sony better come up with something other than legal action in their efforts or they will suffer an amazingly embarassing loss. Short of pulling the game off the shelves, it's unlikely they'll actually succeed in "winning" this battle.
Check out the articles at www.hardocp.com for a slick looking compact water cooling solution. It comes with everything you need in one small enclosure that would typically sit on top of a conventional PC, but you could probably find a place for it to sit in a rackmount installation as well. Water cooling is quiet and can be made reliable with just a little care taken during installation. The reviewed cooling solution has 2 pumps and self-sealing hose connections for example.
I keep an old PC around for experimentation and I had the cable guy install everything to that PC. When he was gone. I re-ran the cable to my firewall.
Consumers won't get a foothold with complaints because 99% of custmers (myself included) are happy enough with finally having high speed internet that they aren't willing to rock the boat.
Slashdot Mirror
Bit Torrent download - 45ish meg art of the sabre movie in 4 minutes 6 seconds via cable modem. My hardware firewall is making it difficult for me to serve back more than one or two uploads at a time, but this is so cool I'll probably leave BT running another hour or so. I have it set for unlimited upload, but for some reason it seems to top out at around 30kB/s and 2 or 3 connections. Download speed was in the neighborhood of 300kB/s. Just amazing, it's like the slashdot effect in reverse.
I wonder - Could something like BT be used for web sites? That way the more people hit a site, the faster it loads? A browser plugin for entire web pages instead of one file like the current BT?
Uh.... someone patent it quick before MS or SCO reads this!
Set usage policy with a fee/penalty structure, and hold them to it. Ignorance of consequences is no excuse for filling the server with logfiles.
Charge the security consulting firm with your downtime expenses too... They may refuse to pay, but simply getting the invoice may make them think twice about doing that to you again.
Another interesting thing is that while a lot of the comm/computer work done in the military is pure nuts and bolts stuff, things like basic connectivity, network access, email, server capacity, etc, in many cases they are running these basic services across a trillion dollar hardware infrastructure that you won't see in the civilian world for years. The average military user/client/customer wants basic network service, they want it now, and they want it even when in the middle of a desert or jungle or ocean. That is challenging and can be quite interesting and entertaining especially when your office can't afford to order a $100 hard drive, but when someone drops a 2 million dollar antenna, you just pull a spare out of the closet and hook it up... Or when your command authority decides to firewall a range of ports because AIM or napster uses them, never understanding the fact that the program that tracks and centrally logs flight hours for all military aircraft also needs those ports, so suddenly billions of dollars of money spent on flying operations can't be accounted for until every single unit in the military pushes through a waiver allowing them to punch through the firewall again.
It's an interesting and occasionally frustrating mix of the fantastically cool and unbelieveably stupid/inane. A tech's ability to function under those circumstances is a definate PLUS when they're looking for a job after getting out of the military.
In the Communications/Computer career fields in the military, you can get a lot of experience but don't get paid crap unless you stick around for 20 years. Even then, a 20 year enlisted troop makes less per year than a 4 year officer. As civilians, that enlisted troop would probably make double or triple what the officer could make based on the hands-on experience each would have gained, but military pay is based on rank and selective retention bonuses for undermanned fields, not actual job skills or qualifications.
The hassles are similiar to the civilian world (boss calling at midnight on Sunday during a scheduled server upgrade demanding that her email be turned back on immediately, idiot users causing trojan/virus infestations, etc) plus the added bonus of deploying to places where you can get shot at. On the gripping hand, if you're not lined up for another job and have some bills to pay, a 4 year stint in the military can be a good place to grab a bunch of experience.
My advice if you're going to join the military - take the student loans, finish your degree, and go in as an officer. The difference in pay and personal freedom is worth almost any amount of suffering required to get that degree BEFORE seeing the recruiter. The hiring rate for ex-military personnel has been high for a fairly long time now and doesn't show any signs of weakening either.
I remember when I got the first myst... I had just finished a couple of upgrades (cyrix drx2 cpu and a blazing fast 2x cdrom!) and got MYST to try everything out. I started playing at 10pm and had finished the entire game at 6am the next morning. Even though each puzzle had the same format, requiring you to visit 3 sites in each area to get info and then plug that info into the machinery in other areas, I remained fascinated through the entire marathon session.
The toughest part of MYST was where you had to listen to the sounds to determine which direction to go in the tunnels. Keying in on the sounds took almost 30 minutes, but since I knew the info was there, it didn't stop me entirely. I took approximately 6 full pages of notes and copied down the keys for every puzzle after I figured out the first one and saw that I'd need a way to remember reasonably complex information. The first puzzle probably took 2 hours but the rest came faster as I got used to the puzzle format and navigating around.
On the other hand, I spent a month with Riven, found every area, and never did solve a single puzzle (as far as I know). I managed to drain the big dome once but with everything else, I never did figure out which ones were important and which ones were just toys. Like the button that called in the sea creature to the underwater window... Never figured out what the hell that was for. And the valves in the lagoon near where you put the little metal pea into the cage and lowered it. I spent 2 full weeks there, an hour or two a day plus 5 hrs each weekend, and never managed to get anything useful from there.
I just couldn't find any PATTERNS that applied anywhere else in the Riven world. Frustrating. I had a map drawn of every area I went to, found some things by accident but couldn't duplicate them (knife fell out of the lever once) but I never connected even a single link other than how to get from one area to another. The little window looking thing with the three buttons that raised and lowered... I once did something random that let me see something in the viewport, but pushed the wrong three-button code and 2 hours later didn't have any idea what, if anything, I'd accomplished. I even bought the cheat guide but never read it because I was too ashamed. I must have spent 6 months in that game and felt like I had accomplished nothing. I suppose if I actually read the cheat guide it all would have been amazingly simple once I learned the system, but I was unable to find the relationships between each area, machine, gadget, and creature.
If you put a sheet of this stuff on your shoes, can you skate on concrete or climb up walls without moving your feet?
How about a pad of this stuff you could drive your car onto, then apply the current to have your car creep sideways. Would be great for repositioning your car in your garage.
No more roller-ball conveyer belts, just a sheet of this stuff.
Think about a bodysuit made of it. Ridges out = you can slither around like a snake without effort. Ridges in, and it could be hooked up to a computer for a full body sensory feedback from your favorite games.
But it IS a viable business model. Telemarketing is highly profitable, scalable, and startups have a relatively low overhead.
The fact that it's annoying as hell to those who have even a tiny amount of control against impulse buying does not invalidate the business model, it is merely a barrier that can be planned for.
And a lot of people use their "private personal LANs" for home businesses. Every one here who wrote their computer off as a business expense would run the risk of, if audited, having to pay more taxes on equipment they already paid tax on. How many taxes have already been paid? How about sales tax, import tariffs on foreign produced equipment, communications taxes on their internet connection, taxes on the electricity used to run the equipment, plus they're paying property tax on the building housing the equipment.
Are they going to count the little ones and zeros and somehow prove they're being used for business? What about a dual-use (personal/business) network? Do you, as a homeowner, bill yourself as a business owner, for network usage time? Is the tax rate based on the percentage of use, depreciated on a timeline based on calendar days or billed minutes? Will homeowners need to install 1 and 0 counters, with a bogotax bit set in the ip headers so the equipment knows what electrons are taxable?
Pah. If the people start obeying laws, the only way to hold a stick over their heads is to make more laws that makes everyone a potential criminal. The fear keeps people in line.
5 computers, 5 802.11b cards, one base station... plus 5 separate SSIDs and WEP keys in use. Prove I have a lan beeyatch! Maybe they want to tax my wireless phone 'cause it's using 2.4 ghz? Or does my 900mhz wireless speaker setup count too because sometimes I can hear it on my old 900mhz phone?
If I use my neighbor's 802.11b access point, do they tax me or him?
At least they're at work though, not on the run like the Texas democrats. I'd rather pay a politician to sit in his office and think up stoopid laws than pay them to run away to Oklahoma and say "nayah nayah nayah!" I think I'd get fired if I made my boss send out the cops to chase me around.
Exclude SCO right in the license. Put in a line that forbids compilation, distribution, modification, and all other use by SCO management, in SCO products, and on SCO-based machines.
Oh, ok :)
My mistake for being snippy in my comment, sorry. I should probably leave editorial comments about other people's web sites to the professionals. When I saw that link I had a micro-flashback to a site that got slashdotted a few weeks ago that put up some rather sarcastic commentary/flamage about slashdot, and I made an incorrect assumption.
Mea culpa. Thanks for keeping your site up. It's a great resource to protect everyone from companies who are trying to hide the fact that they're deliberately selling damaged goods.
Has anyone else noticed that under the "kitchen sink" page down by the assorted links section, slashdot is linked with the tag "News for Nerds Nothing matters"
Interesting slam...
It's essentially the same thing. The accuracy is degraded by offsetting the clock just a little bit. We're talking errors of only miliseconds here so you can still set your watch by GPS, but it's enough to throw in an uncertainty volume into the computed position. Remember that the position is actually calculated by the GPS device through the differences in received timestamps (simple version of how it works).
Browsing through my firewall logs, a simple "file://attackeripaddy" in a browser window results in around 80% success using either no username/password, or a simple "guest" username with no password. On occasion, I'll have to throw a "C$" on the end (file://attackeripaddy/c$) but that's only necessary with fools running winNT or winXP instead of win9x. Sometimes it's even obvious that the people with compromised and unsecured computers are spammers...
Banging on my firewall then leaving their own computer open is arguably an invitation to come on in and look around. Leaving a guest account open is a clear invitation to come on in and look around just like having anonymous ftp available is an invitation to enter and at the very least look around. They're both file servers, both well known and documented...
Lock that 80% out of the internet, or even slap them upside the head temporarily, and 80% of the computers whacking away at my firewall will stop. That doesn't sound like a bad thing to me. Stupid/ignorant people who let their computer get used as a DDOS or other worm/trojan client through a basic lack of care don't get any pity from me.
New York State Soil is Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Try the bank... Either a signature loan or put your pennies in the bank until you can buy one outright.
Wouldn't something like this make public terminals more useful?
5 GB of encrypted data is more than enough to store a complete desktop workspace and even if it's not durable enough to put in a wallet, it IS small enough for a shirt or front pocket. The ideal companion software for this device would be an operating system utility to dump your entire workspace onto the card so you can set up anywhere anytime without worrying about setup hassles or security. The article mentions onboard encryption so even losing the device wouldn't be an immediate loss or compromise of your workspace property.
At my work, we have a network infrastructure problem so our system admins won't give us roaming profiles even though the nature of our business means that we don't always work at our own desks. A 5-10 meg profile doesn't seem that large, but in our case (old building, old/clunky LAN) it's too much to shove over the network each time we log on, so we have to manually set up a user profile on each computer. An encrypted card with our workspace and profile on it might make for a tidy solution and reduce network load even when we finally get our new LAN up and running someday, because we could take that card and load our profile anywhere even when away from the home office.
It would need OS support and reasonably cheap hardware and you can't count on Microsoft to play ball unless they thought of it first, but the potential seems obvious.
Those AV styled cases are even more expensive due to the fact that you'd have to buy new hardware to fit inside it. My multimedia box next to my TV is ready to go into a new, nicer looking case, except that it uses a full ATX motherboard. I'm willing to spend some coin on a new case, but I'm not willing to change the hardware configuration from a known-good setup just to fit into a new case. If I'm going to do that, I might as well buy a prebuilt or bare-bones setup like those nice little shuttle mini systems.
The aircraft checklists I've been using for the last few years are no longer printed on paper, rather a material that sounds just like this. It can be written on, is slightly flame resistant, is water and oil resistant, and it tears/cuts like plastic (stretches unless you cut it first.)
We've probably saved a few million bucks going to this stuff in addition to saving trees and not having to buy hundreds of thousands of plastic page protectors that we used to need. Except for not being able to use it for toilet paper in extreme cases of airborn intestinal distress (ewww), I haven't found any drawbacks to the stuff.
You're missing the idea that many (most?) RAID 0 setups use 2 identical drives. My RAID controller documentation specifically indicated 2 issues regarding the drives used. First, it indicated that performance would suffer if two different drives would be used. Not MIGHT, but WOULD. Second, it said that if drives of two different sizes were used, the total capacity would be twice the size of the smaller drive.
Based on those two issues, it seems reasonable to think that many (most?) people making RAID 0 arrays would use two identical drives. I know I did in my RAID 0 setup.
I built a Pentium 3 gaming system from almost the ground up and decided as games seem to be having longer and longer load times, I'd get an ABIT motherboard(SA6R) with highpoint raid onboard. I matched it with 2 40gig IBM drives (the ones that don't suck) and the speedup in desktop response time even in non-gaming tasks was immediately noticable. To help offset the statistically halved reliability, I have the drives mounted in a cage with 2 case fans blowing cool air over them.
That motherboard died slowly as the capacitors blew out one by one, but it didn't kill the RAID array. Since I didn't have a full backup of the entire volume, I replaced the motherboard with another ABIT motherboard (KR7A) using the next edition of the same highpoint controller, but using an Athlon CPU this time. The RAID volume was fortunately recognized immediately, however the old windows install was unrecoverable because I never could convince windows98SE setup that I was now using a VIA chipset instead of the Intel 815. I ended up deleting the windows directory, re-installing windows, and then re-installing all my software over the old installations which saved all of my data and most of my non-registry application settings. This process was reasonably quick due to the high speed of the drives.
On the VIA chipset motherboard the RAID array is slightly slower than on the Intel board, however VIA released a driver that recovered most of the RAID speed. It's still easily the fastest responsing computer in the house out of 4 systems, primarily due to the hard drive speed.
I don't recommend RAID 0 for anyone but the hard-core hardware tweakers because the potential for rather amazing difficulties is rather high. If the motherboard dies, I will lose the array if I can't find another motherboard or controller card that recognizes the existing array format. That's easy now, but might not be easy next week or next year. Add double the statistical failure rate on top of that (remember I'm running IBM drives, ugh), and it's definately not a solution for a system that must be reliable with quick failure recovery times.
The RAID array also makes overclocking somewhat more of a gamble. I nearly doubled my disk score under PCMark2002 with a mere 3 mhz FSB overclock, however the system also became slightly unstable and I couldn't tell if it was bad memory or the drive subsystem becoming flaky at the increased speed. Some hard drives and drive controllers are notorious for being finicky about running at higher speeds, and I've read that IBM drives in particular do not tolerate PCI bus speeds much over standard.
It sure is fast though, enough so that I don't have anything but the video card overclocked. 20-30 day uptimes on a win98SE gaming rig speaks for itself. That's horrible compared to linux, but it's outstanding for a win9x gaming rig.
I haven't had the time to try Linux on this machine and since it's both my game rig and daily-use machine and the games I play (flightsims and driving sims) don't run all that well under linux, and I don't feel like dual-booting my main rig. I run it 24/7 and in 2 years I've lost one power supply, one 80mm case fan, and one stick of DDR memory in addition to the failed ABIT motherboard. Speed is great, reliable speed takes careful parts selection.
The phrase "most resourceful" in the article is a rather thin disguise. The author is trying to say "Sony's best customers are also the ones most capable of becoming cheating bastards with the potential to ruin the game for the wider and less technically adept player pool."
Hacking the protocol is great, nothing wrong with that. Actually USING the hack during public gameplay is cheating, plain and simple. I personally don't think it's something the courts should have to deal with, but it's still a game exploit and rampant cheating has ruined more than one online game in the past. Sony has every right AND THE OBLIGATION TO IT'S NON-CHEATING USERS to do whatever it can to hamper efforts to use game cracks/hacks/whatever to gain an unfair advantage over other players.
That said, Sony better come up with something other than legal action in their efforts or they will suffer an amazingly embarassing loss. Short of pulling the game off the shelves, it's unlikely they'll actually succeed in "winning" this battle.
All three of the officially listed mirrors linked from the story are either down or carrying a line "screenshots removed at microsoft's request."
Bummer
Check out the articles at www.hardocp.com for a slick looking compact water cooling solution. It comes with everything you need in one small enclosure that would typically sit on top of a conventional PC, but you could probably find a place for it to sit in a rackmount installation as well. Water cooling is quiet and can be made reliable with just a little care taken during installation. The reviewed cooling solution has 2 pumps and self-sealing hose connections for example.
I keep an old PC around for experimentation and I had the cable guy install everything to that PC. When he was gone. I re-ran the cable to my firewall.
Consumers won't get a foothold with complaints because 99% of custmers (myself included) are happy enough with finally having high speed internet that they aren't willing to rock the boat.