I had pretty much given up all hopes of DRM-free video via legitimate channels, even as music is pretty much DRM-free exclusively.

I'm not getting my hopes too much, but like DRM-free music before it, I'll be very eager to give them my money instead of buying DVDs with it.

I'm however fully expecting like eBooks, the DRM-free selection will remain sad and pathetic.

1) If you're in business, likely you don't care about the privacy of searches anonymised under legal agreements because, well, there's just nothing quite that interesting and if your employees complain, you have to wonder what they are Googling in their spare time that they don't want you to know about.

2) Alternatives. I was an Opera user since before 3.something. It peaked a year or two ago, the developers were moved on, and it's now just junk and uses Chromium backend. IE isn't a sensible alternative either (trust no browser that wants you to go to Bing by default, has the Bing toolbar, etc. either). Quite what are we supposed to use and deploy? Firefox? The MSI and GPO integration is still all random-third-parties that we have to trust did it right and didn't add their own junk in.

Sorry, but on the face of it, the privacy "problem" isn't really a problem for most people. I agree that privacy is an issue and I get more than most people that privacy is just something you should have by default, not be made to justify or fight to get. But, honestly, there's little choice.

And when you're a techy working for a business, you'll deploy what's been agreed on, which will be the lesser of most evils. At least Chrome MSI-deploys and has proper GPO and respects Windows Internet Options, and is cross-platform in other respects.

At home, I still use Opera. But only until websites start crapping out on it, because there's no way I want to touch the newer versions anyway (whatever their underlying browser).

Back in the day, my enterprise storage vendor warned us that tape was not terribly reliable and to no reuse tapes. The more consumer oriented formats were especially failure prone. Something like LTO was much more reliable but still not something you want to reuse a lot of times.

Hard disks don't have that problem.

So... you should probably compute TCO based on how your software vendor tells you you should use your tapes and not just gloss certain considerations over.

> You're dreaming if you think HDDs don't fail without warning.

More often than not, they fail WITH warning. Or rather, they give you some indication that it's time to replace a drive and you aren't stuck scrambling at the last minute because it was a surprise.

If this stuff is sneaking up on you, you are probably not paying attention.

I haven't had TW for years, but when I did, it was newsworthy when it was actually working.

Well for one thing you are conflating two very different groups of activities commited by two very different groups of people. You are conflating the actions of soldiers with the abuses committed by spies.

As far as "destroying all the surrounding stuff", that's just basic warfare. Whatever propaganda you've been feeding yourself has got you convinced that there's such a thing as "surgical military action".

Combat is not surgery. Never was.

This is something that I addressed in my original post and something that you chose to ignore and remove.

> So, live your entire life as though you're going to get fired tomorrow. Sounds like real fun.

If you work in IT, the whole "disaster recovery" thing should not be new to you. It doesn't just apply to technology. If problems are readily forseeable then certainly you should try to plan for them and be as prepared for them as possible.

You don't necessarily have to go overboard. With many things, the most effective measures are the initial ones that are just past total apathy.

Being slightly more prepared than the next rat is a very useful thing.

Plus, if you are a slightly more prepared rat then the thought of being fired tomorrow won't weigh on you quite so heavily.

Slave is a pretty accurate term for that arrangement. It also works for midieval European peasants too.

...and the Easter Island heads "walked" into place.

They actually could have. A team of scientists actually worked out how this could be done and did a trial run with one of the heads.

The "walked it" down one of the roads from the stone quarries.

As virtualization became 'cool', people said 'look how many instances you can cram on these gigantic boxes'. This quickly became 'how many instances am I going to lose if this goes down' or 'how many do I have to live migrate to service this thing?'. The cost advantages of scale with a larger box are quickly offset by practical issues. As such, if you need that much memory in a single system, those sort of boxes are still very valued (in-memory databases and some particular sorts of modeling for example). If the workload naturally fits into more nodes of smaller size, it frequently makes sense to opt for the higher node count. There is of course different break points depending on judgement calls, but most places seem to think of two sockets as about the sweet spot.

So you have a quad-core with hyperthreading.

But in general I agree with the sentiment. I do think comparing random whitebox with the big POWER boxes fails to capture the whole reality, but it's easy enough to note that alongside that random whitebox there are enterprise grade suppliers using the common architecture. A person able to slap together a whitebox x86 may not be as useful for business continuity on his own left to those decisions, but those same skillsets can be employed toward an enterprise solution while staying in the x86 family. POWER does not scale down yet, and that is one of IBM's missions. I'm skeptical they will succeed, but at least they acknowledge ecosystem as a key need.

It is a market segment that is seeing growth, and the hype machine has gone into overdrive under the assumption that anything that grows will grow indefinitely overtaking anything it conceivably could in its path.

The reality like all other times before is that it might get more adopted than it should before receding to the appropriate amount as it plateaus as the hype gets done. Thin clients have been around for ages even as the hype behind them has erupted and died out multiple times. They clearly have their role but it is clearly not the end-all, be-all that these companies bill it as.

The funny thing is, Windows often works better on one than it does on a regular PC, simply because it's crapware-free. :)

On the call I got, I don't think he gave a name. I just assumed it was "Peggy".

That's interesting. I got one of those phone calls. I'm not an AARP member, but I'm old enough to be on their list (they keep sending me snail mail asking me to join). Unfortunately, they called after 10PM when I wasn't fully awake, so I didn't think to play with them. He said something in a thick accent I could barely understand about my computer being slow, and I mumbled something back that he probably couldn't understand and hung up.