...but I thought that the Canadian RIAA had a tax tacked onto blank storage media that was supposed to help pay for the pirated tracks. Did that disappear?

I'm not an engineer, but I don't think that that's going to truly solve the problem at this point.

Even if Apple did this tomorrow, you still have GPUs with over two years of heat wear involved. Similarly, depending on the situation, maxing out the fans at the first sign of a Youtube video may be nice and all, but depending on the situation, the solution would be to ratchet down the clock speed of the GPU, which will NOT make happy campers out of the people who want that GPU to run at full speed during render/transcode/gaming operations.

I would concur that Apple should do this in addition to replacing the affected GPUs (so that they have a fresh start), but in lieu of it seems to only be asking for trouble down the road.

I disagree. My Origin EON17 has been rocking for three years with a GeForce 460M without a problem at all. The issue isn't the GPU. The issue is trying to cram a half-decent GPU into anorexic laptops. Apple frequently trumpets their tech as being "thin", which to many people, is a selling point. I understand that. My laptop is, at its largest point, about 2 inches thick. Finding bags that fit it has been a challenge on many occasions. It weighs over ten pounds, and the power brick is another three.

The issue is that companies are trying to copy the super-thinness of a Mac, but still match them on specs. One of the things that Apple does do well as far as design is use the aluminum case as a part of the heatsink; laptops that use plastic can't do that (and, on the contrary, must account for the added insulation). If you want a desktop replacement, it's possible, but you WILL have the fattest, heaviest laptop in the Starbucks. That is the cost of the power. If you want something thin and light, then I agree - don't expect to be rendering 4K scenes in Maya with any meaningful amount of speed on that Intel integrated chipset.

I loved that player, too. In fact, you sparked a moment of nostalgia. If you have one as well, download here: http://www.glop.org/sonique/

It still works, even on Windows 8 x64. Now I will say that it doesn't work WELL...and by that, I mean that you have to run the installer in compatibility mode for Win95, and batch-adding songs into a playlist is an excercise in patience. Also, the default visualization plug-ins don't look so hot on modern displays since they don't scale much past 640x480 I don't think...but they get stupid fast framerates. All of that said, I'm pleasantly surprised that a program designed to work on Windows 95 was coded sufficiently well to still work on Windows 8; there are relatively few that do.

As for why it did poorly (answering one of the other responses), I think that my nostalgia trip answers that, too: The program was originally designed in an era where a 200MHz processor and 32MB of RAM was a generous complement of hardware. The program, on a 3.2GHz Core i7 with 12GB of RAM *still* took nearly ten seconds to start. You don't win people's hearts when a music player takes as much time to load as Photoshop, especially when Winamp was able to be up and running in 3 seconds or less on similar hardware.

I was, however, a huge fan of Lightmagick and a few other plug-ins, and the skin gallery was most definitely the DeviantArt of its day, much more so than Winamp, whose skin library during the 2.x days was much more formulaic.

In my opinion, it's coming...

First, Apple made the App Store paradigm on mobile. This indicated that people were willing to pay a company to 'nanny' their software installation experience.

Then, Apple made a mint on it, presumably selling more iOS apps in any given quarter than desktop apps. This means that Apple users have more iOS apps than OSX apps.

Then, Apple introduce the Mac App Store as an optional download for OSX. This enabled users who wanted a consistent location for software downloads to have Apple sort things out for them, whilst Apple got a 30% cut of higher grossing apps.

Then, Apple bundled the Mac App Store by default.

Then, Apple gave you warning messages if you didn't download from the Mac App Store, though they did make it possible for you to turn them off.

Then, Apple sealed up their hardware, both the laptop and desktop flavors, making it more difficult to buy upgraded hardware for it that didn't connect through a Thunderbolt port.

I see a general trend toward Apple being more controlling, not less. Now the problem is that, to many, MANY people, this is a FEATURE. Their laptop breaks, they get a newer, shinier one for three years. They don't have to worry about getting a toolbar they didn't want. They've never opened a terminal window, and they were never going to double their RAM later on or fill their PCI-Express slots anyway. "Thinner", "Lighter", and "Faster" are more understandable upgrade terms than "twice the RAM", "four dedicated PCI-Express lanes", or "mSATA cache drive".

There are /just/ enough people using Apple hardware that need applications like Adobe Creative Cloud (never gonna be in the App Store) or Serato (low level CoreAudio drivers for SL2/3/4 hardware won't happen in a sandboxed environment) to keep Apple from sealing off the third party software installation methods entirely. I'm still betting that by 2016, Apple desktop/laptop products won't allow third party program installations - by then, Apple will have made some sort of deal with the biggest stragglers like the aforementioned Adobe and Serato to get them into the App Store on special terms, and then so few people will be principally opposed to not having "Ma Apple" control their installations and updates that the loss in business will have been long-since eclipsed by the 30% they make on the copies of Waves plugin bundles ($7,000) or the $50/month Creative Cloud subscriptions that Apple will no longer have to care. And Apple loyalists will still be ravenously defending their flagrant disregard for the technologically inclined.

I sense that the viewership of Fox News by the Slashdot demographic is headed for an increase.

D-Link has been hit-or-miss. I've been rather happy with Tenda at the low end, yes they're obviously Chinese and unabashedly so, but I've gotten dual-band N routers with gigabit ports for $40 at Microcenter, on no particular sale day, and have never had to touch them since.

The next step up would be Buffalo, who, for quite some time, have been running DD-WRT as their stock firmware. Slightly modified versions of them, sure, but never to the point of uselessness.

From there, you go to Asus. Nearly all of their routers have run alternative firmware for some time; my N56U has been shuffling packets at some pretty solid speeds for years, even when it was a VPN endpoint, FTP server, DLNA server, and running Transmission, all at the same time. The next tier down didn't do the faster speeds, only had 10/100 ethernet ports, and no USB host (so no torrent/FTP/DLNA functions), but they hovered around $50 and ran most of the same firmware releases. Also, Asus' first party firmware has been updated regularly for the past few years, far longer than I've seen any other router manufacturer write firmware.

Finally, I've been pretty happy with the Western Digital router I bought one of my clients. I wasn't looking for them specifically, but what they brought to the table was a router that has seven gigabit ethernet ports, for less money than it would have cost to get an N56U and a 5-port gigabit switch...then we didn't have to deal with multiple wall warts or congestion with the uplink or anything like that. Those Western Digital routers are quite snappy as well, they do DLNA, FTP, and SMB sharing, and I've never had to reboot it.

There have been great alternatives to Belkin, Linksys, Netgear, and D-Link for some time. They just don't sell them at Staples, Best Buy, or Wal-Mart.

The issue with answering is that a false dichotomy is made: either that the Creator is the result of creation, or that the universe, as we observe it, with evidence of the big bang, couldn't have been the result of the process used by the creator and only could have come out of a spontaneous series of events. Given that dichotomy, yes, it makes more sense for the observable universe to have been formed spontaneously, rather than a supreme entity being the first result of the big bang to then guide the rest.

The article linked above may interest you to this end; it discusses the possibility that the Genesis account of creation was God explaining the process of creation, using terminology understandable to goat herders and fishermen, to describe the formation of energy, mass, and subatomic particles.

To address the underlying question here, my point is more that plenty of people - creationists and noncreationists alike - get hung up on proving or disproving the Genesis account of creation based on the method being described. The point I was trying to make earlier is that, if we believe in a God who caused the observable universe to exist, then by definition God would not be bound by the rules of creation itself any more than a programmer is bound by the rules of the programs he writes, or an architect by the buildings he designs. Thus, also by definition, understanding how God came into existence is inherently an impossible question to answer, for the rules He created do not apply to Him.

I don't see how the two are unable to coexist. Because we believe in a divine entity, we are incapable of appreciating beauty in the natural world? It would seem that the opposite would be true; a person believing in the deity of a supreme creator would be more apt to attribute a beautiful sunset or a gazelle running through the wilderness or heat waves rising off the desert sand as a level of beauty that points to the glory of God.

Christian and creationist here. Yes, there are a handful of us on Slashdot, and there is, in fact, a bit of a gradient between "Atheist" and "Westboro Baptist Nutjob". I'm generally a moderate, and I believe that God (the Deity), the church (an establishment), and "Christian Culture" (how Christians interact with each other) are three different, distinct concepts, which means that there are 100,001 different subtleties between the beliefs of any one Christian. Therefore, answering the question in terms of the "they" that you referenced is extremely difficult. Here is how I, Voyager529, will answer this question...

Genesis 1:1 is the part that I take literally - in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. I do believe that Yahweh God, a Being whose existence I will never be able to fully comprehend, caused the universe as we observe it to exist. Was there something before the current universe? I don't know. Are there parallel dimensions? I don't know. How did God come into existence? Couldn't tell you. What I do know is that I personally have an easier time believing that a Being I can never understand undertook a process that I will never understand, as opposed to many of the foundational questions whose implications make the original parts of the Big Bang a bit of a challenge - a few quick ones that come to mind are the laws of physics (were they "always there" and 'existed' before the Big Bang [thus enabling the Big Bang to take place], or were they a byproduct of the Big Bang [so then what caused the Big Bang?]), abiogenesis (how did DNA become a working blueprint for everything, that has consistently worked since the earliest known fossils?), and the difficult-to-fathom volumes of random chance involved (earliest humans having distinct male and female reproductive systems, able to work correctly together, throughout all the gradual changes while still maintaining 'backward compatibility', in the same geographical region...or were they sudden, in which case, the same problems arise). I'm not saying that it's impossible for these questions to have an answer that doesn't involve God, but I'm saying that based on my understanding of things as I presently understand them, a Creator makes a bit more sense to me.

The next bit, specifically, the parts involving the sequence of creation (light, sky/water, vegetation, celestial objects, animals, people, rest)...there is minimal weight put upon this part. What I get from this part is the following: First, God spent time designing each of these things, therefore, they are all valuable to Him. Second, is that there was a duration of time involved - whether it's 144 hours or 144 trillion years is irrelevant, since time is itself a creation. However, the fact that God used time as a part of the process indicates that God also places a value on time. Finally, the fact that there is a sequence involved means that God places value on things being done in order, and adhering to a procedure.

These are the underlying concepts that I find in the first parts of Genesis that I find important, because really, they're the parts that are demonstrated. I've heard 101 arguments as to /how/ creation happened, though this one I found to be particularly fascinating. While the Slashdot crowd will generally understand the concepts in the discussion of creation in the above link, given that we understand the existence of subatomic particles and the correlation between energy and matter, when Moses was writing down Genesis, he was addressing a much simpler crowd, for whom keeping goats fed during the day and not getting pillaged at night was considered an accomplishment. Thus, I see no problem whatsoever with God giving a grossly-oversimplified-version of what He actually did to Moses, with the actual nuts-and-bolts being far beyond the comprehension of His audience.

Regarding the coexistence of both evolution and a personal God, that one is pretty simple: God works in systems. Remember, if we postulate that everything that we presently observe was created by God, that means that all of the order we see in the universe - from the mathematical constants in Newtonian physics, to the motion of celestial objects so accurate that the slightest deviation is a hint that there is an unobserved object nearby, to the emission spectrum of Cesium-133 that defines the atomic clock, to the tides, the human body, the food chain, and fractal geometry. There are rules and systems all around us that govern how the natural world works. There is nothing in the Bible that indicates that evolution could not have been one such system. Certainly there is plenty of room to discuss to what extent evolution is involved - natural selection (e.g. giraffes with long necks being "preferred" when food sources are high up) can easily coexist with creationism. Even a certain amount of macroevolution can make sense in a universe created by the God of Genesis. Things do start to get shaky when we start at a very low level, since humankind was explicitly stated as being created by God, so 'evolution' in the sense that 'God didn't directly create the living creatures found on earth' could be explained by it being an underlying principle of God setting the world in motion as a whole, implicitly with a bit of a "head start" of having many of the things be random chance be predetermined with the "correct" combinations being the ones "attempted" out of the starting gate, and there are some who believe that. As for me personally, I'm still of the persuasion that God was directly involved with the creation of life as we observe it, and I don't see how that would suddenly all collapse if it were suddenly found that the first iterations of zebras didn't have stripes.

Hope it helps!

A set of fair points. Allow me to clarify:

1.) The BitTorrent Sync software is freeware; I pay neither for a license nor any monthly fee. While you're obviously correct with the hardware aspect of it (more on that in a bit), the nice part is that the client is available for plenty of different operating systems, so the odds of it running on /something/ that's around is helpful. For example, the 'Old XP desktop" that is still lying around can be used for this purpose in conjunction with an external hard disk that would have been purchased for backup purposes anyway. I'm not necessarily saying that having a FreeNAS is the correct solution for everyone, but BT Sync works as a solution for everyone that has a second computer that can act as a storage hub, regardless of OS.

2.) On the heels of point 1, the hardware lying around can do the syncing, which was more what I was getting at. A FreeNAS is the hardware that I personally "have lying around", which clearly isn't everyone's situation. However, though Black Friday deals and an AMD CPU and DVD drive I had lying around, I built a FreeNAS with all the other required parts (PSU, MOBO, 16GB of ECC RAM, 5x3TB HDD's, case, assorted cables, cheap GPU) for $950 that gives me 8TBytes of storage on a RAID-6. Is it at the level of an Equalogic or EMC solution? Certainly not. Is it affordable for someone who needs 8 real-world terabytes of storage? I've had a rough time finding something less expensive; the price can be brought down even more if less space was needed or if more parts could be re-used.

3.) FreeNAS itself is getting a bit big, I'll admit. ZFS has always been worse than Windows and Adobe combined in its ability to very effectively eat up whatever RAM is availed to it. Nas4Free (the more-open-source fork of FreeNAS after iXsystems bought them) is a bit better at hardware usage efficiency, but if you're using older hardware, you may find yourself better off not using ZFS. Conversely, the (1GB RAM)/(1TB Storage) rule isn't atrocious to hit if you're doing, say, a simple 3TB RAID-1 with a pair of drives and a motherboard that can support DDR2 RAM. Nas4Free uses about the same amount of RAM because it's also using ZFS, but it's going to give you slightly better throughput rates for older hardware. Similarly, a less powerful CPU is perfectly fine if you're okay with leaving compression off; I used a $35 Sempron processor in my old one flawlessly, albeit with ~55MBytes/sec over a gigabit LAN because I had compression on and was pegging the CPU during transfers.

4.) If you're doing a simple rsync on your exising setup, BT Sync runs on both Linux and BSD, and it uses a CLI/json config file / web GUI, so you can run it on your system even if it's a CLI-only box. Richard Stallman probably wouldn't because it's not FLOSS, but that's a matter of ideology, not what's technologically possible.

The difference between Live Mesh and BT Sync is that Sync is decentralized; stuff isn't stored on a hard disk that isn't yours. I find the performance hit to be difficult to measure, unless you intentionally tell it to do so (you can force it to high disk priority, which is helpful for the first sync on a LAN).

As far as conflicts go, I tend to use it in a somewhat conservative way - I always make the initial sync involve a blank folder; I've never synced two folders that are both pre-populated for the very reason you specify. To me, it's always made more sense to manually weed out the differences, since it will be more likely that I will be able to deduce the 'correct' version than not. Additionally, BT Sync gives both a read-only folder key and a read/write. By giving my NAS the read-only key, I'll never be wrong. Finally, BT Sync has a special folder where deleted files go, so 'oops' moments can be restored somewhat easily on either end.

Microsoft Security Essentials for the free stuff - I'd like AVG or Avast or Avira more if they weren't the Overly Attached Girlfriend of software.

ESET's NOD32 for the paid variety. It doesn't nag, it doesn't go nuts on your CPU or RAM, and it's very accurate.

Well, it sorta depends. Some variants do versioning; Acronis does this, and I think Carbonite does, too.

This is also true. However, the underlying point here is that there are different means of accounting for different kinds of failures. A RAID-1 means that you're screwed if you hit the 'delete' button, but a disk failure won't bit-bucket everything on the drive. Cloud syncing with a provider that enables versioning means that you can go back and fix an 'oops', but very few of them are going to give enough storage to do a multiversion backup of even a healthy-sized My Pictures folder without being expensive to the point that it's more cost effective to buy a Western Digital My Book World Edition or similar.

Personally, I use BitTorrent Sync to go to my FreeNAS box, which has 30 days worth of snapshots on the dataset containing the folders I sync, itself on a RAID-6. It's great, it's simple, it's free, it's fast on my LAN, it stores in real-time, and the storage on the NAS dwarfs that of my laptop.

If you have an iPhone/iPad/iPod, Apple.
If you have an Android phone/tablet, Google, and likely Samsung/HTC/Hawei/LG.
If you have a Windows Phone/tablet, Microsoft, and likely Nokia/HTC/Samsung.
If you watch movies on your phone, the MPAA.
If you play music on your phone, the RIAA.
If you have a data plan on your device, then AT&T/Verizon/Sprint/T-Mobile, or your regional MVNO.