Sure. Buy a mac. And I'm saying that as someone who thinks macs are overpriced trendy hipster-ware.
We are talking about $400 and I assume that is in the USA. just saying "Buy a mac" is a bit unreasonable since you have no idea what that person wants the computer for. If they want the PC for gaming although IMHO $400 is a bit cheap for that, then a MAC is most likely not suitable.
If they want to predominately surf the web or just some general purpose computing such as view movie files, edit photographs, basic office work.. etc, then a machine running an Apple OS, MS Windows OS or even a Linux distribution OS would be fine.
Of course if they are considering the odd "Games for Windows" as well then they are pretty well locked into a Microsoft OS and for a new machine that usually means MS Windows 8/8.1.
Have you ever seen and compared an equal sized (assuming an aspect ratio of 16:9) 4k TV against a 1080p TV with appropriate content respectively? There is a huge difference although there is little content for 4k TV at the moment.
UHDTV is coming, and these current 4k TVs will not be compatible. For a start, the resolution will be UHDTV1 2160p (just under 4k) and UHDTV2 4320p (that's almost 8k!), rec.2020, 100fps and 120fps, plus much more. Plus DRM issues.
Err 4k TV with an aspect ratio of 16:9 (most HDTV's are this) is actually 2160p (3840x2160 pixles) and surprisingly the difference in price may only be about 20% more than a HDTV. 8k HDTV's are really in the prototype stage and will most likely be quite expensive when they do come out.
Testing in the UK for UHDTV1 is 2016, 2020 for UHDTV2 which the Olympic Games in Japan will be shot at.
This is going to be interesting, since there are few if any content providers (ie. Free to Air, Foxtel, etc) that provide more than 720p and will not provide 1080p content for the foreseeable future so what hope for 4k and 8k. I would assume the 4k and eventually 8k content will be on Blu-Ray disks which would require you purchasing a 4k (PS4 and XBone can supposedly do this) and eventually an 8k display device (PS5 and maybe an XB180/???:)).
I'm an engineer, but I wouldn't poo poo Scott Adams just because he's not. If he (or anyone else) comes up with some interesting designs, I'm sure that many skilled engineers and scientists will sanity check them before the detailed design begins
As a Professional Electrical Engineer I have always enjoyed Scott Adams Dilbert cartoons and looking at his education he is no layman having attended Hartwick College and the University of California, Berkeley where he received an MBA in economics and management.
While his proposal seem to be the stuff of Sci-Fi the principles are valid although I personally doubt with our current technology that it would feasible in our lifetime and taking a few pages out of his Dilbert books the amount of management (includes private and governmental) cooperation would be staggering.
Taking a simple example: What has happened to the Space Elevator?
Actually English is derived from a West German dialect called Frisian, however over the centuries it has incorporated many other languages including early French and Danish. Still you are right it is relatively easy to translate English to German and vice-versa however it is also very easy to to stuff up the context which can easily be misinterpreted. A good example of this is to go to a web site that is in a different language and see how the page translator handles this.
Japanese or even to Chinese to English translations can be quite strange to the English speaker and that is only translating the written language. As for almost real time translation of the spoken word I hope lazy diplomats don;t even use this technology (at least not yet) otherwise World War III is just around the corner:)
I think that's the point - none of us really stress the PCs CPU, so you can easily "outsource" it to a server somewhere and just download the results either on-demand like streaming a game, or via a web interface.
Why would you want to pay to "outsource" an application that you could easily run on your PC and have full control of everything?
What makes you so sure that it is any easier for the average PC user to actually use "Cloud" services compared to actually running their own applications on their PC?
That's why I think the cloud will actually become something (I didn't think this a few years ago) simply becuase people want the processing capabilities for various things, but do not want the hassle of a PC they don't understand and have to keep maintained (ie updated)
The so called "Cloud" is a marketing buzzword that IT people back in the early 1980's knew as "Remote IT Services". So far nothing has changed.
The problem with using the "Cloud" is that you have to pay for it. This maybe fine for corporations who have done their homework (many don't) and have the money which means weighting up the advantages, disadvantages and overall costs. As for the standard home PC user they also have to do their homework and "outsourcing" one or more applications to the "Cloud" when their home machine can just as easily do the same job is IMHO just plain stupid.
As for the hassle of a PC you should keep maintained. You have heard of automatic updates although personally I prefer manually doing them. Even doing backups I would love to know of any "Cloud" service that would allow you to backup 1TB or more cheaply and as for recovery has this been tested or do you pay the excess to your ISP when the need arises.
So yea... I get the whole "more resolution captain!" Absolutely. Every day all day. But I use a 27" monitor that only does 1920x1200... "Only." That's plenty for work and pleasure - i'm playing the new wolfenstien at that resolution, and its beautiful.
While I do agree with you to a certain point it must be pointed out that if the monitor or even a HDTV (4k or 1080p or 720p) has an aspect ration of say 16:9 which is what many Hi Def monitors and most HDTV's are then if you are dependent on the aspect ratio of the content be it game or movie. If the content's aspect ration is say 16:9 then the display of that content will fully fill a 16:9 screen. However if the content has an aspect ratio other then the aspect ratio of the screen which has physical dimensions and cannot be changed you are going to have what is called "letter-boxing".
However, I would love some ultra widescreen for more real estate. To me, 4k is just too faddish, and thus too expensive for the poor nerds amongst us to justify purchasing.
For a monitor more real estate is great however that may not be ideal for some movies or games. In fact it is quite bewildering/annoying that some content which is best viewed full screen may have to be letter-boxed to keep the appropriate proportions (ie. aspect ratio). Do a quick Google search on "aspect ratio" and you will get 54 million hits of which many could explain this issue better than I can without writing a paper on it.
I don't believe that - unless you have a screen the size of a small movie theatre your eye cannot distinguish between 4k and 1080p resolution pixels.
Yes you can unless you have a problem with your eyes.
If you take a 4k TV with an aspect ration of 16:9 which is the same as most (not all) HDTV's on the market then the pixel resolution is going to be 3840x2160 (ie 2160p) which actually can almost look like a photograph (assuming the appropriate content). This is not to say 1080p is bad in comparison however once you get into larger screen sizes such as say 80 inch (203.2 cm) upwards the difference in screen resolution become much more pronounced.
The Playstation-has-no-games meme was true back when the PS3 first came out, but it ended up with significantly more (and often better) exclusives than the 360 - hell, their camera & motion-tracking add-on had more and better exclusives than the 360's kinect. Of course, since memes never die, the next-gen console with more exclusives is being mocked for having no games. What's next, people claiming the xbox controller is huge for people with huge hands?
How are the games obsolete? I bought a PS3 in September and have over 20 games on disk along with a bunch of digital ones and I love it.
Not only that but if you have PS1 games you can still play them on your PS3, but with the exception of a few PS1 games you probably won't. Unfortunately only the first FAT PS3's played PS1, PS2 and of course PS3 games, however if you compare graphics on a decent large HDTV most PS1 games are fairly grainy even with smoothing on, the PS2 (FAT only) is quite reasonable and many games are very playable.
It is unfortunate but as time goes by the only way to play older PS1, PS2 and eventually PS3 games is to run them in an emulator. This does not only apply to PlayStation games but all games that ran on a different architecture.
At the moment I have no intention of purchasing a PS4 since there are not many games I see for it that makes it a compelling purchase for me. Backwards compatibility would have made for a compelling reason since I have many PS3 games I am still interested in purchasing as well as ones I am currently playing and since I like RPG's and Action Adventure I have enough for 100's of hours of game-play before I even consider getting a PS4.
I don't remember having to patch Morrowind, Oblivion or Fallout 3.
You either never played them or are lying. Those games had to be patched to fix tons of bugs after release. Morrowind and Oblivion also had lots of patches for bugs from modders that Bethesda never fixed themselves.
In conclusion, your post is total BS.
Well I have never played the PC versions of the above however I do have the PS3 version of Oblivion and I have not seen any patches for it and the game plays fine. The only complaints for the PS3 version of Oblivion is the character generator were everyone appears to be hit with the "Ugly Stick":) and the fact that levelling up appears to be pointless since all the enemy does as well.
I don't own an XBOX One, I'm a PC gamer, but I have to say I'm impressed to see a company that's willing admit their mistakes...I'm looking at you Nintendo...get your act together.
I think many people are not impressed since a little market research would have informed Microsoft that all their initial requirements for the XBone (sorry they asked for this abbreviation) were not going to be appreciated by most of the people who would purchase a console. Having done all these back-flips they should have called their console XBox180 or XBox540:)
In terms of High Definition consoles there were only two last generation consoles, the PS3 and the XBox360, so basically it was a two horse race of which the PS3 is currently winning in world wide sales. The Wii was only Standard Definition which sort of put it in the PS2, XBox and Game Cube camp.
The Price isn't what is making people choose the PS4 over the XBox. But the fact you can access internet services such as Netflix without having to pay a monthly fee, to access data you are already paying for.
I don't have a PS4 since there aren't any games on it that I am interested in (likewise the XBone), although I will at a later date get one. If the PS4 had backwards compatibility I would have got one on first release since I still have PS3 games I have not finished and the difference in graphical output while noticeable is not significant enough to convince me to purchase a PS4 at the moment.
As for paying for a subscription to Netflix I do have to agree that having to pay a monthly fee (ie Xbox) just to access this is ridicules, however when I purchase a gaming console the last thing on my mind is purchasing and downloading movies.
Well, I have a horse in this race and it's already won, been given the ribbon, watered down, fed some oats, and released into a nice pasture to frolic with the mares. It's called a PC and you don't have to worry about bundling, Kinect, being locked out of DLCs (aka Skyrim), etc.
I think most people who post here have a PC in one form or another.
Personally I have a gaming Laptop on which I have exclusively put Fedora 20 (I always keep it updated) which effectively stops me playing "Games for Windows" since I could not be bothered setting up Wine and have no intention of dual booting because I am not very interested in PC games preferring Console (PS3) games instead.
Are PC games (aka Games for Windows) better than console games? Well that depends on the gamer and what they like.
unless you build CHIPS, you can't build a fully trustable computer anymore. maybe using 30 yr old chips, but not any modern chips
You can treat a "chip" as a black box (standard engineering/technical practice) and from the Manufacturers specifications (they are available) it is surprisingly easy to determine if that chip has been compromised. Scale up to any electrical equipment such as a router and the same principles apply since the tester needs only to know what is input (they control this) and what they expect the device to output and if the output is different from what is expected then the device is faulty or compromised.
Sure a tester is only human and may miss something important, however it only requires one person to actually blow the whistle and you have many interested parties getting involved. If it can be shown that the manufacturer is deliberately putting in back-doors then the loss of sales and possible litigation could be very damaging to that manufacturer and no manufacturer would knowingly risk being put in such a compromising position.
Citation? Not that I expect an AC to respond, but this sounds like you pulled it out of your ass.
"Sorry Mr President, we have confirmed there is an armed nuclear weapon heading to Washington, but it is arriving by mail so there is absolutely nothing we can do to prevent it. Trust me, an anonymous coward told me so."
Since you asked for a citation under US Law does this count . A little searching could also pull up the laws governing tampering with mail in other countries as well..
It looks to be using 24 panels in a 6x4 configuration.
'Standard' 250W panels are 40"x65", giving my 20'x22', so 'close enough', especially if you slant it a bit.
Assuming ideal, that's 6kw. More realistically 3kw in most areas, about 43kwh per day. About 129 miles of electricity at 3 miles per kwh.
Sounds good on paper, however unless the person who uses this is a night worker the whole array is pretty much next to useless since most day workers would have taken their electric car to work and only return to park under their now non functioning solar car port once the sun has gone down. Of course if we consider the weekend the electric car could be recharged during the day unless the driver has decided to take the car to say a shopping centre. So I think I would be fairly confident to say that with regard to recharging the electric car most of the charging would actually be from the mains.
Instead of spending money on a car port just to power their car it is more practical to feed the solar power back to the grid and/or powering devices that require power during the day. This is not to say that the car port is a waste of money but like anything that is solar powered some thought is required on the best use of the device.
Hey, no problem. You can have my XP when you ship me a free replacement, and it has to run Autocad.
Well you have locked yourself into AutoCad which does not come cheap in the first place or are you a member of the "Green Parrot Brigade"?:). Personally I don't see you having a problem upgrading to MS Windows 7 or later and running AutoCad, assuming your hardware is capable of supporting the OS upgrade. Of course there is a cost involved with upgrading a Microsoft OS but it really helps to be a GPB member if you do this.
Or, you're a grandmother, the computer-box is working like it always has, and you're afraid of changes that an upgrade would bring, don't have money for new hardware, etc.
You are really denigrating grandmothers or grandfathers in general when you say stupid throw away lines like that. How old do you think a person has to be when they become a grandmother/grandfather? Answer is may only be their late 20's or even early 30's.
So at 185TB per tape with the write speed of LTO6 "at speeds up to 400MB/s (1.4TB/hr)" [optimal]....~132 hrs per tape. But in reality 300 MB/s or 1 TB/hr so about 176 hr/tape. 168 hours in a week.....Next weekly back up starts before the first one finished.....
Yeah, I know, they're not all level 0 backups.....you get the idea....sometimes it might be better to have 2 smaller tapes, than 1 large.
If that is the case then your backup strategy is totally wrong. To get the best performance from a backup you should be streaming your data to the actual tape, however this in practice is rarely true.and consequently you get what is commonly called a "shoe-shine effect" in that the data will be written to the tape then stop while waiting for the next batch of data to catch up, however when the next batch of data arrives the tape has to reposition itself. Obviously this is very inefficient and can add a considerable amount of time to the backup.
To get around the "shoe-shine effect" you can purchase a virtual tape storage library which contains an array of RAID disks, a smart controller and one or more tape devices. By doing this you can create one or more virtual tape drives from the disks and at specific times the data that is stored by the virtual tape devices are streamed to the tape drive with zero impact on the machines that you are backing up. A virtual tape library also has the added benefit of allowing for extremely fast backup and recovery as well as a streamed backup method to tape that fully utilises the tape drives performance..
Is a virtual tape library expensive? The best way to answer this is to ask how much is your data worth and what are the ramification and costs if you you need to make a recovery and there is a problem with your backups. Once you have done your research a virtual tape library can cost from a few thousand dollars to many thousands of dollars which like I said requires you as the proposer of said device to do your homework.
Sony will turn it into a propietary format, allowing someone else to develop a work around at 1/3 the price.
Why would you say that? All they need to do is patent the technology then collect royalties and/or licensing agreements. Not any different to what has been done already in the magnetic tape industry. I suppose you could create a propriety format but we are talking magnetic tape.and any company would be stupid if the tape reader device can't read earlier tapes (assuming LTO type format) to a certain point such as say LTO-7 (assuming) then LTO-6 and LTO-5 although going back further would just increase the price of the reader/writer.
Err no! The stars are mainly a fusion reactor that consumes Hydrogen which in turn produces predominately Helium resulting in vast amounts of energy being released. A "fire" normally requires Oxygen and our star has no Oxygen to aid that process.
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Sure. Buy a mac. And I'm saying that as someone who thinks macs are overpriced trendy hipster-ware.
We are talking about $400 and I assume that is in the USA. just saying "Buy a mac" is a bit unreasonable since you have no idea what that person wants the computer for. If they want the PC for gaming although IMHO $400 is a bit cheap for that, then a MAC is most likely not suitable.
If they want to predominately surf the web or just some general purpose computing such as view movie files, edit photographs, basic office work .. etc, then a machine running an Apple OS, MS Windows OS or even a Linux distribution OS would be fine.
Of course if they are considering the odd "Games for Windows" as well then they are pretty well locked into a Microsoft OS and for a new machine that usually means MS Windows 8/8.1.
4k is sure a gimmick.
Have you ever seen and compared an equal sized (assuming an aspect ratio of 16:9) 4k TV against a 1080p TV with appropriate content respectively? There is a huge difference although there is little content for 4k TV at the moment.
UHDTV is coming, and these current 4k TVs will not be compatible. For a start, the resolution will be UHDTV1 2160p (just under 4k) and UHDTV2 4320p (that's almost 8k!), rec.2020, 100fps and 120fps, plus much more. Plus DRM issues.
Err 4k TV with an aspect ratio of 16:9 (most HDTV's are this) is actually 2160p (3840x2160 pixles) and surprisingly the difference in price may only be about 20% more than a HDTV. 8k HDTV's are really in the prototype stage and will most likely be quite expensive when they do come out.
Testing in the UK for UHDTV1 is 2016, 2020 for UHDTV2 which the Olympic Games in Japan will be shot at.
This is going to be interesting, since there are few if any content providers (ie. Free to Air, Foxtel, etc) that provide more than 720p and will not provide 1080p content for the foreseeable future so what hope for 4k and 8k. I would assume the 4k and eventually 8k content will be on Blu-Ray disks which would require you purchasing a 4k (PS4 and XBone can supposedly do this) and eventually an 8k display device (PS5 and maybe an XB180/??? :)).
I'm an engineer, but I wouldn't poo poo Scott Adams just because he's not. If he (or anyone else) comes up with some interesting designs, I'm sure that many skilled engineers and scientists will sanity check them before the detailed design begins
As a Professional Electrical Engineer I have always enjoyed Scott Adams Dilbert cartoons and looking at his education he is no layman having attended Hartwick College and the University of California, Berkeley where he received an MBA in economics and management.
While his proposal seem to be the stuff of Sci-Fi the principles are valid although I personally doubt with our current technology that it would feasible in our lifetime and taking a few pages out of his Dilbert books the amount of management (includes private and governmental) cooperation would be staggering.
Taking a simple example: What has happened to the Space Elevator?
Actually English is derived from a West German dialect called Frisian, however over the centuries it has incorporated many other languages including early French and Danish. Still you are right it is relatively easy to translate English to German and vice-versa however it is also very easy to to stuff up the context which can easily be misinterpreted. A good example of this is to go to a web site that is in a different language and see how the page translator handles this.
:)
Japanese or even to Chinese to English translations can be quite strange to the English speaker and that is only translating the written language. As for almost real time translation of the spoken word I hope lazy diplomats don;t even use this technology (at least not yet) otherwise World War III is just around the corner
I think that's the point - none of us really stress the PCs CPU, so you can easily "outsource" it to a server somewhere and just download the results either on-demand like streaming a game, or via a web interface.
Why would you want to pay to "outsource" an application that you could easily run on your PC and have full control of everything?
What makes you so sure that it is any easier for the average PC user to actually use "Cloud" services compared to actually running their own applications on their PC?
That's why I think the cloud will actually become something (I didn't think this a few years ago) simply becuase people want the processing capabilities for various things, but do not want the hassle of a PC they don't understand and have to keep maintained (ie updated)
The so called "Cloud" is a marketing buzzword that IT people back in the early 1980's knew as "Remote IT Services". So far nothing has changed.
The problem with using the "Cloud" is that you have to pay for it. This maybe fine for corporations who have done their homework (many don't) and have the money which means weighting up the advantages, disadvantages and overall costs. As for the standard home PC user they also have to do their homework and "outsourcing" one or more applications to the "Cloud" when their home machine can just as easily do the same job is IMHO just plain stupid.
As for the hassle of a PC you should keep maintained. You have heard of automatic updates although personally I prefer manually doing them. Even doing backups I would love to know of any "Cloud" service that would allow you to backup 1TB or more cheaply and as for recovery has this been tested or do you pay the excess to your ISP when the need arises.
So yea... I get the whole "more resolution captain!" Absolutely. Every day all day. But I use a 27" monitor that only does 1920x1200... "Only." That's plenty for work and pleasure - i'm playing the new wolfenstien at that resolution, and its beautiful.
While I do agree with you to a certain point it must be pointed out that if the monitor or even a HDTV (4k or 1080p or 720p) has an aspect ration of say 16:9 which is what many Hi Def monitors and most HDTV's are then if you are dependent on the aspect ratio of the content be it game or movie. If the content's aspect ration is say 16:9 then the display of that content will fully fill a 16:9 screen. However if the content has an aspect ratio other then the aspect ratio of the screen which has physical dimensions and cannot be changed you are going to have what is called "letter-boxing".
However, I would love some ultra widescreen for more real estate. To me, 4k is just too faddish, and thus too expensive for the poor nerds amongst us to justify purchasing.
For a monitor more real estate is great however that may not be ideal for some movies or games. In fact it is quite bewildering/annoying that some content which is best viewed full screen may have to be letter-boxed to keep the appropriate proportions (ie. aspect ratio). Do a quick Google search on "aspect ratio" and you will get 54 million hits of which many could explain this issue better than I can without writing a paper on it.
I don't believe that - unless you have a screen the size of a small movie theatre your eye cannot distinguish between 4k and 1080p resolution pixels.
Yes you can unless you have a problem with your eyes.
If you take a 4k TV with an aspect ration of 16:9 which is the same as most (not all) HDTV's on the market then the pixel resolution is going to be 3840x2160 (ie 2160p) which actually can almost look like a photograph (assuming the appropriate content). This is not to say 1080p is bad in comparison however once you get into larger screen sizes such as say 80 inch (203.2 cm) upwards the difference in screen resolution become much more pronounced.
The Playstation-has-no-games meme was true back when the PS3 first came out, but it ended up with significantly more (and often better) exclusives than the 360 - hell, their camera & motion-tracking add-on had more and better exclusives than the 360's kinect. Of course, since memes never die, the next-gen console with more exclusives is being mocked for having no games. What's next, people claiming the xbox controller is huge for people with huge hands?
Now that leeds to the following cartoon :).
How are the games obsolete? I bought a PS3 in September and have over 20 games on disk along with a bunch of digital ones and I love it.
Not only that but if you have PS1 games you can still play them on your PS3, but with the exception of a few PS1 games you probably won't. Unfortunately only the first FAT PS3's played PS1, PS2 and of course PS3 games, however if you compare graphics on a decent large HDTV most PS1 games are fairly grainy even with smoothing on, the PS2 (FAT only) is quite reasonable and many games are very playable.
It is unfortunate but as time goes by the only way to play older PS1, PS2 and eventually PS3 games is to run them in an emulator. This does not only apply to PlayStation games but all games that ran on a different architecture.
At the moment I have no intention of purchasing a PS4 since there are not many games I see for it that makes it a compelling purchase for me. Backwards compatibility would have made for a compelling reason since I have many PS3 games I am still interested in purchasing as well as ones I am currently playing and since I like RPG's and Action Adventure I have enough for 100's of hours of game-play before I even consider getting a PS4.
I don't remember having to patch Morrowind, Oblivion or Fallout 3.
You either never played them or are lying. Those games had to be patched to fix tons of bugs after release. Morrowind and Oblivion also had lots of patches for bugs from modders that Bethesda never fixed themselves.
In conclusion, your post is total BS.
Well I have never played the PC versions of the above however I do have the PS3 version of Oblivion and I have not seen any patches for it and the game plays fine. The only complaints for the PS3 version of Oblivion is the character generator were everyone appears to be hit with the "Ugly Stick" :) and the fact that levelling up appears to be pointless since all the enemy does as well.
I don't own an XBOX One, I'm a PC gamer, but I have to say I'm impressed to see a company that's willing admit their mistakes...I'm looking at you Nintendo...get your act together.
I think many people are not impressed since a little market research would have informed Microsoft that all their initial requirements for the XBone (sorry they asked for this abbreviation) were not going to be appreciated by most of the people who would purchase a console. Having done all these back-flips they should have called their console XBox180 or XBox540 :)
As for Nintendo, Sigh! I totally agree.
And hey, the Xbox360 won last time
The underpowered Wii won last time.
In terms of High Definition consoles there were only two last generation consoles, the PS3 and the XBox360, so basically it was a two horse race of which the PS3 is currently winning in world wide sales. The Wii was only Standard Definition which sort of put it in the PS2, XBox and Game Cube camp.
And how exactly is it supposed to phone home every 24 hours without a connection that's available at least every 24 hours? Dumbass.
Ah but they did tell you how, it was called an XBox360 :)
The Price isn't what is making people choose the PS4 over the XBox. But the fact you can access internet services such as Netflix without having to pay a monthly fee, to access data you are already paying for.
I don't have a PS4 since there aren't any games on it that I am interested in (likewise the XBone), although I will at a later date get one. If the PS4 had backwards compatibility I would have got one on first release since I still have PS3 games I have not finished and the difference in graphical output while noticeable is not significant enough to convince me to purchase a PS4 at the moment.
As for paying for a subscription to Netflix I do have to agree that having to pay a monthly fee (ie Xbox) just to access this is ridicules, however when I purchase a gaming console the last thing on my mind is purchasing and downloading movies.
Well, I have a horse in this race and it's already won, been given the ribbon, watered down, fed some oats, and released into a nice pasture to frolic with the mares. It's called a PC and you don't have to worry about bundling, Kinect, being locked out of DLCs (aka Skyrim), etc.
I think most people who post here have a PC in one form or another.
Personally I have a gaming Laptop on which I have exclusively put Fedora 20 (I always keep it updated) which effectively stops me playing "Games for Windows" since I could not be bothered setting up Wine and have no intention of dual booting because I am not very interested in PC games preferring Console (PS3) games instead.
Are PC games (aka Games for Windows) better than console games? Well that depends on the gamer and what they like.
unless you build CHIPS, you can't build a fully trustable computer anymore. maybe using 30 yr old chips, but not any modern chips
You can treat a "chip" as a black box (standard engineering/technical practice) and from the Manufacturers specifications (they are available) it is surprisingly easy to determine if that chip has been compromised. Scale up to any electrical equipment such as a router and the same principles apply since the tester needs only to know what is input (they control this) and what they expect the device to output and if the output is different from what is expected then the device is faulty or compromised.
Sure a tester is only human and may miss something important, however it only requires one person to actually blow the whistle and you have many interested parties getting involved. If it can be shown that the manufacturer is deliberately putting in back-doors then the loss of sales and possible litigation could be very damaging to that manufacturer and no manufacturer would knowingly risk being put in such a compromising position.
Citation? Not that I expect an AC to respond, but this sounds like you pulled it out of your ass.
"Sorry Mr President, we have confirmed there is an armed nuclear weapon heading to Washington, but it is arriving by mail so there is absolutely nothing we can do to prevent it. Trust me, an anonymous coward told me so."
Since you asked for a citation under US Law does this count . A little searching could also pull up the laws governing tampering with mail in other countries as well..
It looks to be using 24 panels in a 6x4 configuration.
'Standard' 250W panels are 40"x65", giving my 20'x22', so 'close enough', especially if you slant it a bit.
Assuming ideal, that's 6kw. More realistically 3kw in most areas, about 43kwh per day. About 129 miles of electricity at 3 miles per kwh.
Sounds good on paper, however unless the person who uses this is a night worker the whole array is pretty much next to useless since most day workers would have taken their electric car to work and only return to park under their now non functioning solar car port once the sun has gone down. Of course if we consider the weekend the electric car could be recharged during the day unless the driver has decided to take the car to say a shopping centre. So I think I would be fairly confident to say that with regard to recharging the electric car most of the charging would actually be from the mains.
Instead of spending money on a car port just to power their car it is more practical to feed the solar power back to the grid and/or powering devices that require power during the day. This is not to say that the car port is a waste of money but like anything that is solar powered some thought is required on the best use of the device.
Hey, no problem. You can have my XP when you ship me a free replacement, and it has to run Autocad.
Well you have locked yourself into AutoCad which does not come cheap in the first place or are you a member of the "Green Parrot Brigade"? :). Personally I don't see you having a problem upgrading to MS Windows 7 or later and running AutoCad, assuming your hardware is capable of supporting the OS upgrade. Of course there is a cost involved with upgrading a Microsoft OS but it really helps to be a GPB member if you do this.
Or, you're a grandmother, the computer-box is working like it always has, and you're afraid of changes that an upgrade would bring, don't have money for new hardware, etc.
You are really denigrating grandmothers or grandfathers in general when you say stupid throw away lines like that. How old do you think a person has to be when they become a grandmother/grandfather? Answer is may only be their late 20's or even early 30's.
So at 185TB per tape with the write speed of LTO6 "at speeds up to 400MB/s (1.4TB/hr)" [optimal]....~132 hrs per tape. But in reality 300 MB/s or 1 TB/hr so about 176 hr/tape. 168 hours in a week.....Next weekly back up starts before the first one finished.....
Yeah, I know, they're not all level 0 backups.....you get the idea....sometimes it might be better to have 2 smaller tapes, than 1 large.
If that is the case then your backup strategy is totally wrong. To get the best performance from a backup you should be streaming your data to the actual tape, however this in practice is rarely true.and consequently you get what is commonly called a "shoe-shine effect" in that the data will be written to the tape then stop while waiting for the next batch of data to catch up, however when the next batch of data arrives the tape has to reposition itself. Obviously this is very inefficient and can add a considerable amount of time to the backup.
To get around the "shoe-shine effect" you can purchase a virtual tape storage library which contains an array of RAID disks, a smart controller and one or more tape devices. By doing this you can create one or more virtual tape drives from the disks and at specific times the data that is stored by the virtual tape devices are streamed to the tape drive with zero impact on the machines that you are backing up. A virtual tape library also has the added benefit of allowing for extremely fast backup and recovery as well as a streamed backup method to tape that fully utilises the tape drives performance..
Is a virtual tape library expensive? The best way to answer this is to ask how much is your data worth and what are the ramification and costs if you you need to make a recovery and there is a problem with your backups. Once you have done your research a virtual tape library can cost from a few thousand dollars to many thousands of dollars which like I said requires you as the proposer of said device to do your homework.
Sony will turn it into a propietary format, allowing someone else to develop a work around at 1/3 the price.
Why would you say that? All they need to do is patent the technology then collect royalties and/or licensing agreements. Not any different to what has been done already in the magnetic tape industry. I suppose you could create a propriety format but we are talking magnetic tape.and any company would be stupid if the tape reader device can't read earlier tapes (assuming LTO type format) to a certain point such as say LTO-7 (assuming) then LTO-6 and LTO-5 although going back further would just increase the price of the reader/writer.
And when your purchased app *requires* it.. ?
If your "purchased' app requires a specific web browser then you have been royally ripped off.
No, that's methane. Wrong gas.
I realise the AC was making an off colour joke but the chemical symbol of Methane is CH4 so it does have hydrogen in its chemical formula.
The stars are also fire.
Err no! The stars are mainly a fusion reactor that consumes Hydrogen which in turn produces predominately Helium resulting in vast amounts of energy being released. A "fire" normally requires Oxygen and our star has no Oxygen to aid that process.