I just don't see any purpose in saving config files online. Even for backup purposes, a USB key is more than enough. Two reasons, both of which I would think are obvious.
1. Your configuration is available to you on any computer with Steam installed. You can go to a friend's house and load up your game and it's already set how you want. Or you can show him the cool thing that happens in your particular savegame, whatever.
2. Backup. You mentioned that USB keys make adequate backups, but that's not true. Why? Because USB keys don't remember to plug themselves in before your hard drive crashes or you reformat or reinstall game "x". A system that automagically performs a desired action (backing something up) is always preferred to a manual equivalent. Besides, nobody said you can't keep using your USB key and now you'll have double redundancy.
What you, and I quote, "seem to forget" is that the tool discussed in this thread does deal with the case you're presented. Through the use of a second 'hidden' encrypted volume, analogous to a false bottom in a briefcase, when investigators locate encryption software as well as a partition with lots of random data on it and force you to provide them the encryption key, you only provide them the 'outer' or 'public encrypted' volume. That volume is then decrypted, and unfortunately for investigators or other inquiring 3rd parties, it is impossible to tell whether a false bottom encrypted volume exists within the first encrypted volume or not without being provided the password.
For more reading, educate yourself at http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/?s=plausible-deniability and http://www.truecrypt.org/hiddenvolume.php
Indeed, if it had been 'a couple hours', it wouldn't have been a problem. But rarely was it so. In my personal experience (I was on Duskwood-US from shortly after that server's birth until about two months ago, when I gave the game up) the downtime would often last into the digits. That's hours. I can remember several tuesdays, coming home from work around 6pm and not being able to login because my server was still down. They'd give a list of 'affected servers' on the login screen, it was usually about 25-30 servers a week going down. Maybe it was the same servers giving problems week after week, which would explain why many players wouldn't notice it. I don't know, as I said, my experience is limited. But this would be a big deal to me, if I still played.
My.02
I believe you are confusing the weekly 'maintenance' periods (a couple hours each) with the once-every-month-to-two-months patch maintenance period. They both take place on Tuesdays, but Blizzard doesn't 'patch' the servers on a weekly basis. In my experience (playing since retail day 2), Blizzard has been pretty darn good with sticking with their normal Tuesday maintenance cycle, and my server (Thunderhorn), which has been habitually plagued with problems since the beginning of the game, has more often than not been up earlier on normal maintenance Tuesdays than Blizzard stated it would be.
Now then, every couple months when they truly apply a patch (upgrading the client and server versions of the game), yes, servers normally take even a couple days to recover. That's not good - but then again, perhaps because of my previous experience playing SWG (shudder) - having the game be down for a 24 hour period once every two months isn't all that bad. And its predictable - its not like just one day *poof* the servers are gone. Blizzard gives advance notice on their forums of when major patches are going to hit, and you can bet your butt that big-patch-day-problems are NOT going away any time soon. Most recently, the game client updated to 2.0 in preparation for the expansion pack, and as a result a number of major game mechanics were altered. You can't expect that to happen in a live hotfix.
I wonder if you have a 1366x768 display, if you could bypass the internal scaler by feeding it a DVI signal from an HTPC, and then use the HTPC to position the 1280x720p frame in the center of the 1366x768 one, thus giving you an unscaled image?
Why would you do that?
I own a HTPC and a Syntax Olevia 37" LCD HDTV. The panel's native resolution is, you guessed it, 1366x768. I simply connected my HTPC via a standard VGA cable and added the custom resolution 1366x768 using my ATI driver / powerstrip. Voila, native resolution display.
I'm only ever concerned for scaling artifacts when its the LCD doing the scaling for me - I play most my movies and videos using Media Player Classic, and its ability to upscale / downscale video is superb. In addition, since I have an X1650 video card in the HTPC, and a pair of PS2 controllers plugged in via USB converters, I can play Need for Speed, HL2, World of Warcraft, and other various games on the HTPC in exactly 1366x768 resolution.
I suppose maybe it's just me, but I see (windows) computer users divided into more than just a rookies and experts.
As a result, I find your advice to apply to only some people. Over the years, I find I went through phases of how I like to keep my windows system set up. First, I was a rookie - I installed everything to C, single partition, and then *bam* a drive died.
The next system I built, I'm a little older and wiser perhaps, so I did what you said. First I went with a C + a separate D partition for data/applications. Then I graduated for separate physical C+D partitions. I also began the pain-in-the-ass process of not installing stuff to program files - I put stuff in d:\apps, d:\games, d:\data, whatever. Meanwhile, I'm running antivirus and antispy and all that jazz, which does a number on the performance of your PC.
Then one day, I realized that *nothing* *ever* showed up in my AV logfiles, and Ad-Aware never found anything. Ever. I found I had developed safe browsing habits, using various fox plugins to blacklist entire domains of content I deem unwanted. I keep things patched to current. But most importantly, I simply learned the most important lesson experience can teach: Keep my important shiat somewhere else, and somewhere more reliable.
So I'm back to the beginning. I reinstalled about three weeks ago, all three of my PCs. The only PC of mine that has more than a C drive is because it has seven physical disks. I don't run Antivirus on anything anymore, nor antispy or anti-anything. Everything installs in program files - easy mindless installs (CLICK CLICK CLICK NEXT NEXT NEXT!) are back again. And I could go home and nuke my C drive tonight with no warning and it wouldn't matter one bit. Important stuff stays on redundant storage. Really important stuff stays on storage with versioning - just in case something really goes wrong. And truly important stuff is nightly mirrored off site.
I guess my moral is that eventually you discover the systems aren't the important part - the only thing that matters is the data, and there are easier ways to protect just data than to attempt to protect the entire system + the data.
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What you, and I quote, "seem to forget" is that the tool discussed in this thread does deal with the case you're presented. Through the use of a second 'hidden' encrypted volume, analogous to a false bottom in a briefcase, when investigators locate encryption software as well as a partition with lots of random data on it and force you to provide them the encryption key, you only provide them the 'outer' or 'public encrypted' volume. That volume is then decrypted, and unfortunately for investigators or other inquiring 3rd parties, it is impossible to tell whether a false bottom encrypted volume exists within the first encrypted volume or not without being provided the password. For more reading, educate yourself at http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/?s=plausible-deniability and http://www.truecrypt.org/hiddenvolume.php
Indeed, if it had been 'a couple hours', it wouldn't have been a problem. But rarely was it so. In my personal experience (I was on Duskwood-US from shortly after that server's birth until about two months ago, when I gave the game up) the downtime would often last into the digits. That's hours. I can remember several tuesdays, coming home from work around 6pm and not being able to login because my server was still down. They'd give a list of 'affected servers' on the login screen, it was usually about 25-30 servers a week going down. Maybe it was the same servers giving problems week after week, which would explain why many players wouldn't notice it. I don't know, as I said, my experience is limited. But this would be a big deal to me, if I still played. My .02
I believe you are confusing the weekly 'maintenance' periods (a couple hours each) with the once-every-month-to-two-months patch maintenance period. They both take place on Tuesdays, but Blizzard doesn't 'patch' the servers on a weekly basis. In my experience (playing since retail day 2), Blizzard has been pretty darn good with sticking with their normal Tuesday maintenance cycle, and my server (Thunderhorn), which has been habitually plagued with problems since the beginning of the game, has more often than not been up earlier on normal maintenance Tuesdays than Blizzard stated it would be.
Now then, every couple months when they truly apply a patch (upgrading the client and server versions of the game), yes, servers normally take even a couple days to recover. That's not good - but then again, perhaps because of my previous experience playing SWG (shudder) - having the game be down for a 24 hour period once every two months isn't all that bad. And its predictable - its not like just one day *poof* the servers are gone. Blizzard gives advance notice on their forums of when major patches are going to hit, and you can bet your butt that big-patch-day-problems are NOT going away any time soon. Most recently, the game client updated to 2.0 in preparation for the expansion pack, and as a result a number of major game mechanics were altered. You can't expect that to happen in a live hotfix.
I wonder if you have a 1366x768 display, if you could bypass the internal scaler by feeding it a DVI signal from an HTPC, and then use the HTPC to position the 1280x720p frame in the center of the 1366x768 one, thus giving you an unscaled image?
Why would you do that?
I own a HTPC and a Syntax Olevia 37" LCD HDTV. The panel's native resolution is, you guessed it, 1366x768. I simply connected my HTPC via a standard VGA cable and added the custom resolution 1366x768 using my ATI driver / powerstrip. Voila, native resolution display.
I'm only ever concerned for scaling artifacts when its the LCD doing the scaling for me - I play most my movies and videos using Media Player Classic, and its ability to upscale / downscale video is superb. In addition, since I have an X1650 video card in the HTPC, and a pair of PS2 controllers plugged in via USB converters, I can play Need for Speed, HL2, World of Warcraft, and other various games on the HTPC in exactly 1366x768 resolution.
I suppose maybe it's just me, but I see (windows) computer users divided into more than just a rookies and experts. As a result, I find your advice to apply to only some people. Over the years, I find I went through phases of how I like to keep my windows system set up. First, I was a rookie - I installed everything to C, single partition, and then *bam* a drive died. The next system I built, I'm a little older and wiser perhaps, so I did what you said. First I went with a C + a separate D partition for data/applications. Then I graduated for separate physical C+D partitions. I also began the pain-in-the-ass process of not installing stuff to program files - I put stuff in d:\apps, d:\games, d:\data, whatever. Meanwhile, I'm running antivirus and antispy and all that jazz, which does a number on the performance of your PC. Then one day, I realized that *nothing* *ever* showed up in my AV logfiles, and Ad-Aware never found anything. Ever. I found I had developed safe browsing habits, using various fox plugins to blacklist entire domains of content I deem unwanted. I keep things patched to current. But most importantly, I simply learned the most important lesson experience can teach: Keep my important shiat somewhere else, and somewhere more reliable. So I'm back to the beginning. I reinstalled about three weeks ago, all three of my PCs. The only PC of mine that has more than a C drive is because it has seven physical disks. I don't run Antivirus on anything anymore, nor antispy or anti-anything. Everything installs in program files - easy mindless installs (CLICK CLICK CLICK NEXT NEXT NEXT!) are back again. And I could go home and nuke my C drive tonight with no warning and it wouldn't matter one bit. Important stuff stays on redundant storage. Really important stuff stays on storage with versioning - just in case something really goes wrong. And truly important stuff is nightly mirrored off site. I guess my moral is that eventually you discover the systems aren't the important part - the only thing that matters is the data, and there are easier ways to protect just data than to attempt to protect the entire system + the data.