The Intellimouse Optical really is a tank. As Microsoft's "budget" 5 button mouse they went with a design that was both mechanically and electrically simple, and as such it just doesn't have too many ways to fail. The cable and the teflon pads are both strongly bound to the body, so the only real physical points of failure are the micro-switches. With enough time (and abuse) the switches under the left and right buttons can be worn out, but even that can take several years.

Without parity checking, you simply aren't addressing bit rot. Period. It could be Raid 9 Million(tm) and if all it's doing is copying the data, and not comparing it, bit rot will still proceed apace, silently eating your data. But let's say you're a good administrator that has enabled parity. Great! But there's still a problem: parity cannot restore data that has become corrupted due to bit rot -- it is a detection-only mechanism. So if you have two drives in a RAID-1 with parity configuration, as you also suggest... it will detect the file corruption, but as it cannot correct it, it will then promptly seize up and fall over dead. This is because for every N clusters written, a parity cluster is also written; This allows the array to detect if that data chunk was correctly committed; But if the data on any of the clusters within the chunk are altered later, the RAID array will only know that this chunk of data (known as a stripe in RAID), is invalid. It cannot correct it.

One quick note: a mirrored space running ReFS will do automatic checksumming and scrubbing. This isn't done for parity spaces, though I'm not sure why this is.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/01/16/building-the-next-generation-file-system-for-windows-refs.aspx

This is just my $0.02, but if the trolls are anything like some of the rest of us, I have to assume it's because we're tired of the constant promotion of second-rate codecs that put ideology ahead of technical concerns.

Patent-free video codecs are the ultimate case of NIH syndrome. The major patent free video codecs (Theora, VP8, etc) are largely attempts to recreate/modify existing MPEG video codecs to get around the patents of the aforementioned original MPEG codec.The end results are codecs that aren't appreciably novel compared to the MPEG codec they're going up against, and at the same time it's not even clear (from a legal perspective) whether these codecs really are patent-free, or if they're infringing on the MPEG-LA's patents anyhow. Which is not an attempt to inject FUD into any of this, it's just that there haven't been sufficient legal challenges, and in the meantime it's questionable that these codecs can be so very similar to the MPEG codecs and somehow not fall under the associated patents.

At the same time the fact that these codecs are being pushed opposite the existing MPEG codecs only fractures the market and slows the adoption of new video technologies. We end up with Mozilla and Google flailing around with alternative codecs rather than buckling down and doing what's necessary to secure the rights to use the MPEG codecs in the first place, only finally doing the right thing after they've exhausted every other option. Web browsers should have fully supported H.264 years ago.

It's the codec equivalent of generic colas. Yeah, they're similar, but they're not the same and they're not what most of us are after. And in the meantime it quickly gets tiring of being told how we're doing it wrong by buying the more expensive product. There are certain things in life that are worth paying for, and a good/novel video codec is one of those things.

Which isn't to slag the patent free codec guys entirely. The video codecs have struggled, but the audio codecs have been outstanding. Opus is a roaring success, which I credit both to the development structure for the codec - involving many parties like the IETF early on while clearly shooting for novel/new audio codec - and the technical capabilities of the engineers who designed the codec.

That may be 4 years old, but still, that's damn impressive.

What you're looking for is called the eDrive standard. It lets the OS interface with the SSD in such a way as to allow Bitlocker and other whole drive encryption methods while using the SSD controller to do the encryption.

But that's not the case though. The extremely long design cycles for CPUs (and their associated chipsets) means that Intel has been working on power consumption for years. Haswell and Silvermont made x86 extremely power competitive, and the basic designs for those families were created before Windows 7 was even released, never mind Windows 8.

While it's true that handhelds cycle more slowly than full sized consoles, in the case of the 3DS it was clear after the first year that it was going to do okay. Nintendo's price cut lit a fire that has kept burning since, and the console was well on its way to a long and prosperous life by the summer of 2012.

The Vita on the other hand is coming up on 2 years old now - it launched in the US in February of 2012 - and its position keeps getting weaker, especially in the West. The number of new games that are known to be in development from major western publishers is tiny. It's like 3 or some such absurd number; The Lego Movie Game, MLB 14: The Show, and maybe a new Assassin's Creed game. Everything else is either a port, be it titles like Borderlands 2, God of War, or Final Fantasy X, or a translated game out of Japan. The Vita will likely continue to do well enough in Japan, but in the West there's a distinct lack of investment in the platform by the major publishers.

Consequently there's no real sign of an upswing here; western publishers tried, failed, and have seemingly moved on. They're finishing out their schedules for 2013 and haven't announced anything new for 2014 and beyond. If it continues to survive in the West, it will be as an odd agglomeration of a PS4 remote control, an indie (but not open) handheld console, and a Japanese import handheld console. Which is going to be okay for some people, but for those of us that bought it expecting a more traditional range of games it'll pretty much be the end of the console.

Indeed. And being an overpriced remote control for a PS4 is hardly a fitting existence for the handheld.

The sales aren't there to keep AAA developers interested, and without AAA games there's little to keep buyers interested.

It was a BUG in Safari. It was not a hack in any sense.

So if I take advantage of a BUG in Slashcode in order to download the user and password tables for Slashdot, then I'm not really hacking Slashdot, right?

If you're reading it incorrectly, then both of us are. That's how I read it too.

Okay, I'll bite. What's wrong with the Phantom 630 case that Anandtech used? It has reviewed reasonably well, as far as I can tell.

Tell that to my contacts. They've all ditched AIM for Skype over the last 3 years, and like hell I'm giving up Trillian/Pidgin to get locked into a single program and a single network. The bad old days of walled networks were supposed to have ended 10 years ago.

While TFA provides a good summary of the vote, it does a terrible reason of explaining why the shareholders voted as they did.

So why are the shareholders against Larry's compensation package? The use of stock options means that Larry only gets paid if the company is doing well; or rather more specifically if the company's shares are doing well, which is all the shareholders are going to care about in the first place. At 4.6B shares the company is big enough that Larry's compensation isn't going to meaningfully dilute the value of shares. And switching to traditional compensation packages would eat into Oracle's profits.

What am I missing here? For a company that's doing well, this seems like the perfect way to pay Larry. What is it the shareholders would rather do, and why would it be any better?

How is that DRM supposed to work again?

By keeping you from playing what's primarily a multiplayer game online with a pirated copy. Being able to steal the client won't do you much good without access to the service.

*Looks at Pokemon X/Y sales and 3DS/2DS sales*

All signs point to yes. Dying companies don't sell 4 million games in 2 days and millions of consoles in a year.