Really? Dell supports some alternate OS under warranty even though the PC came with Windows? Gee, I'd not heard that before.

Jail-breaking the iPhone does NOT void the warranty, no different than putting Solaris on a Dell PC does its, but they DO refuse to support it until it is returned to factory specs (re-imaged and not unlocked). It's their right to support only their software, but NOTHING legally prevents you from jail-breaking the device (Though your carrier may have issue with that on a completely separate topic).

Attempts to circumvent Apple's OS are acceptable, so long as you do not SELL a product that does so for other people (as violating the device's DRM commercially is a violation of the DMCA, not Apple's warranty).

It is true they loose charge slowly, but not charge cycles unless fully discharged for extended periods (which damages the polymers).

A typical LiPo battery like in Apple models now, not LiIon in years past, will loose less than 2% charge capacity per year, wether charged frequently or not. Batteries are typically considered defective if after 5 years they have less than 90% of their original charge density/life.

The batteries proposed for the Chevy Volt will bleed less than a 5% loss after 10 years, properly maintained (which is not hard).

Ditto. MBP 15" w/ 9600GT, 500GB, 4GB. Get over 7 hours regularly. Got 5 hours and 40 minutes running DDO inside a win7 VM on top of OS 10.6 in Parallels 5, over WiFi n using a bluetooth mouse... 3D Gaming wirelessly in a VM for almost 6 hours, WOW!.

You're rights include you, a real person, playing for an estimated number of hours, and the scale of the server farm, and monthly cost to play, and expected term of sustained account status (number of months subscribed) are based on these averages. If a tool was allowed, and a mass of people started a) being logged in 3 times as long in an average month, and b) leveled up to max within a few months, experienced all the content, and quit, this imbalances their financials, as well as disadvantages many players who don;t do the same thing.

It interacts with a server in a way a human can't, for extreme long sessions, which is a server load, and is a cost to blizzard on multiple levels.

"Let's just be clear here, what are you saying, that when you lease allowance to use their servers, they have permission to do whatever they want to your local machine and define what software you can and can't run on it?"
Yup.

It's called access control. No they can't take over use of your machine "without permission" but they can mandate patch level, security settings, limitation of other apps that integrate with their systems or cause load on their servers.

A person is reasonably expected to be capable of a max number of online hours (as an average). The monthe fee is based on that basis. The bot apps allow user to be online VAST amounts more time in a day than is typically otherwise possible, causing them additional loads and typing up resources for real people.

  It also sets those without the knowledge to use those bots at a significant disadvantage to those who do, people who as part of their use fees expect to play in a relatively fair and balanced world for their money.

I think this is open and shut. This is essentially a subscription service running on remote systems. Your app, if you want to even argue it;s yours, is only a portion of the code, not a wholly owned app (you don't launch your copy on their servers, they launch their code and allow the app you bought to connect). Without your continuing subscription (or even a free use agreement if it ever goes Free-to-play, not likely), the app you bought is simply nothing more than an activation fee...

They have every right to maintain balance and fairness for the Masses playing, and base availability on predictable numbers. I'd perhaps be OK if, for example only, they said an average player is estimated at 20 hours per week, but a bot runner is estimated at 40, and thus charge a "premium rate" equal to double the base rate to be able to use a bot... but then also limit PvP for bot players only to other players that also used a bot for their game, since I'd really care less as an average player.

You agreed to a contract to play online. It's a subscription. They absolutely can control the access rules.

I worked in the DR industry for years, and supperted DR syystems as a consultant for hundreds of different clients for a decade. I've done thousands of restores on dozens of tape technologies.

yes, newer tape systems are more resilient. however, the tape itself is not. magnetic metal media exposed to the open air in a cartridge can not possible be as stable as a hermetically sealed drive system in a disk.

tape mis-alignment due to sagging spindles (where the tape in the spool slides against itself due to vibration, and creates a conical shape inside of the drive instead of a flat real, later when read, or even just retention ed, can cause the tape to rub against the inside of the cartridge and heat, causing data loss.

A tape itself, without heads, may technically be capable of surviving more Gs of force in a drop (though the plastic corners, not to much), but a disk drive can easily survive a drop from the server to the floor if you're not careful and drop it. In a caddy in a shipping case, we've thrown them from 5th story windows to concrete, repeatedly, and had no issues. We've even frozen a drive in a block of ice and read from it (still frozen!). In a fire safe, a HDDs control board will melt away, but the spindles inside the drive chassis will be fine beyond 250 degrees and the disk can be rebuilt and read fine, but a tape will simply melt, even inside a fire safe (which are only designed to keep internal temperatures below the combustion point of paper, a "media safe" is a whole different thing, and VERY expensive).

HDDs are fast, have parity across disk sets, don;t require expensive robotics and drive heads, and run on common (not arcane, ancient SCSI protocols like MTX), and have better longevity. Disks can alsdo be reused hundreds of times, a tape 10-20 if you;re lucky.

Many of my clients use disk for the rotational and daily backups, as well as the local and remote archive live copies (so restores are from in-house disk, and only archives are offsite, saving time). Long term archives are often to tape still as it CAN be cheaper, but I'd only trust it in weather controlled facilities.

The last firm i worked for shipped over 15,000 hard drives to be used for D2D backup. Drives do fail occasionally, and they're warranty replaced on a regular basis, but never in the 3.5 year history of working for them had a single backup not been recoverable, aside 1 we suspected was due to a backup not having been truly complete when the disk was removed (user did not run the command to spin down the SATA slot, they just pulled the drive).

Boards, controllers, that has nothing to do with data loss from archives, that would only cause the active JOB to fail. Fix the issue and run it again. When a tape drive fails, it costs thousands to replace (if you can get a compatible model). When an array controller fails, they're $500...

I was a skeptic for D2D when i heard about it in 2001. After working for a firm for years that worked with it, I've never looked back. My current employer has a massive IBM infrastructure, almost all tape, more than 20,000 tapes in storage. no way is that going away, there's legal hold data we simple have to keep, and thousands of terrabytes in archive we could not afford to migrate to disk (nor do we have time). However, we're addding D2D capacity to TSM constantly, and in a year if we're lucky, won't be using tape at all anymore. They think that will save us about 500K a year, and provide for near instant restores of files (current recovery of a single file can take 12-36 hours depending on where it comes from) That migration started before i got here, and I've kept silent on my opinion siting conflict of interest (I'm in a position to make purchase decisions, and my former employer is a bidder, so I abstain from comment entirely).

You know not of what you speak.

Red flag rules as well as HIPAA and PCI regulations do leave the doctor responsible for accurate billing practices, the intermediary is only a billing agent that handles transactions. Pissed off customers ARE likely to leave a doctor with an ineffective billing agent. Insurance issues are still handled first party by the doctor, not through the intermediary (the bill can only be sent to a customer after the HIPAA statement is generated and returned to the doctor clarifying coverage. In the end, you have rights, and guaranteed protections, and improper billing practices come with STIFF penalties for both the billing agency, the doctor, and the insurance company.

Now a "collections" agency is a different matter altogether...

I've also been in a 2.5 year fight over a bill for child birth with the insurance company. The doctor's bills are in order, as is the intermediary's bills to me, the only issue is the INSURANCE company not doing the math right, claiming things common to child birth are not covered, miscalculating my out-of-pocket maximum, and more. This has NOTHING to do with the doctor's correct belief that the insurance company paid X, I thus owe Y.

I do agree, the iPhone needs a more impressive lock screen notification system, notification aggregation, and a good home screen. They're reportedly working on that, and they've taken a step forward on notifications. Keep in mind, 2 years ago, there were no apps, and 18 months ago, no notifications. The OS was never intended to do that,so they've got a lot more back end work to do to make it seamless while also not breaking other apps. the OS constantly moves forward, with regular interval, and for little issue with older devices (though the 2G is getting very little of OS 4 at all, it is getting SOME features).

We'll see improvement here over the next year. Android added what people saw missing from iPhone OS. iPhone is catching up to user demand while remaining stable and true to form, Android is fragmenting, having device compatibility and manufacturer will issues, and virus problems. I'll take slow over questionable any day. (not to mention, there's probably patent/license issues Apple has to work around here too).

I've been using D2D offsite backups for 7 years. Shipping disks every day. 1 time we had an issue recovering from 1 disk, and best we could tell it was because the backup actually never finished, the disk was 100% fine.

I've used tapes for 20 years. I have at best 20% success rate recovering entire systems from a tape thats been offsite for more than 1 week, and maybe 60% success recovering single files or folders, and if the drive heads have been changed since the tape was made, recovery likelyhood drops to about 10%.

A 5 year old tape is very hard to find a reader for. A SATA port can be added to even the oldest boards, and an IDE port can be added the the newest. No special hardware or software is required to read my disk backups.

If a tape drive breaks (had that happen many many times in my career) old tapes rarely read on the new drive (even same model). If my server farm is destroyed, i don't even need the same legacy teck, I can use the insurance money on shiny new hardware and still read my offsite disks with no issues.

Backups tapes are cheap plastic and exposed to air, and are a linear set. one bad tape equals an entire bad dataset. Disks we archive in 4 disk RAID 5 sets, are hermetically sealed, and far more resilient. Drisk inside of rail kists that use rubber grommets for better protection packed into hard cases of foam liner. We've dropped them off a 5th story roof to a driveway as a test, and the plastic casing on the rails was instact and we got 100% successful bit read across 8 disks. I've dropped tapes 6 incheas onto a table and fail bit verifies (I used to do that as an example in a demo of how unreliable tape is).

HDDs can be rebuilt, easy, and relatively cheap. The MTBF of an unused disk on a shelf is measured in years, and the "stuck spindle" issue is a forgone issue and no longer applies to modern disks (even a slight vibration overrides locked disks). Tapes settle, unspool, are open to the air and bacteria and corrosion, and the tiny chip in the tape is critical to it being readable, the chips in a HDD can be replaced with no trouble.

Metalic tape has a MTBF of 30 days for bit failure. Their long terms storage is entirely dependent on their parity algorithm. MTBF of a bit on a physical disk is measured in YEARS. Also, a single tape failure in a backup set can ruin the entire set, where a disk failure in a striped RAID disk archive means NOTHING (its a RAID!).

1) a good D2D system uses RAID 5 data sets across disk sets, not individual disks. Tapes don;t do parity striping scross sets so loosing jkust 1 tape in a job set can ruin the entire backup set. Loosing 1 disk means nothing.
2) i used to do DR demos, and I'd drop a bit verified tape just 6 inches and watch it fail a bit level verify, while I had a hard disk I made the team play hot-potato with for 10 minutes, then pass a bit verify.

HDDs are designed for 300G shocks, and when not in use can survive freezing and fairly extreme heat, and are immune to basic environmental issues (even rain if allowed to dry, worst case you replace the board...).

When shipping HDDs, typically they''re in sleeves, bubble wrap, or a foam case. Tapes are stacked in a box.

If you;re telling me cheap plastic and an open air medium is more resilient than a metal casing and hermetic sealing, i want what you smoke.

A HDD can survive a 300G shock, and is atmosphere nuetral. Tapes can't survive 20G shocks, are open exposed to the environment, and even LIGHTING can degrade their state.

MTBF at the bit level on a tape is measured at 30 days, for optical it's about 90 days, for HDD platters its measured in years. HDDs also can easily be rebuilt if there are head issues in an old drive, and data recovery is easy. With a tape, it's virtually impossible to even read a good tape in a drive it was not made on.

oh, 1.6TB compressed? Really?

Compared to a $100 1.5TB HDD, that's 3TB compressed vs your 2 tapes to meet the same, so the cost is nearly a wash on media, and the HDD caddy for 16 drives is under $1K, but the tape drive to read 1 tape at a time in that capacity is probably $4K, and only accepts that capacity and some limited older tape support (not larger in the future, or 10 year old SATA disks from the past).

But, lets look at some REAL numbers:
a) what actually IS your compression ratio?
b) what actually is the max capacity of your tapes in reality (check your logs).

1.6Tb is the max theoretical storage at 2:1 compression, but that assumes no write failures, and assumes your hardware based compression (oh, that costs extra?), actually meets 2:1. See, with a disk, if there's a write failure during backup (rare on spinning disk), it rewrites to the same disk sector. If a tape has a write failure on backup, just 1 bit, it markes a whole tape block with a hash and keeps running. Your cleaning light comes on when you have between 8 and 16 write failures IN A ROW on more than 3 separate places on the same tape, imagine how much tape your wasting when those failures are not all in a row... I've seen 400GB native tapes have a validated capacity under 80GB after a "successful" backup.

Check your tape logs and see just how much tape you are ACTUALLY using, vs the tape your wasting.

Tapes can be cheaper, if you use LOTS of them every day, and have a ridiculous regiment for storing all tapes indefinitely, and rarely if ever overwrite tapes with new backups. however, if your drives are aging, tapes are heavily used, you're wasting money rotating and disposing of them (no tape should ever be used more than 15 times, tapes for long term archive should be brand new and never part of a rotation, a mistake most people make only archiving their oldest tapes, dumb). You're loosing tape storage, your compression ratio is likely nowhere near reality (especially if its not hardware based), and a 1.6Tb tape, just like a HDD, doesn't store 1.6TB of compressed data (most 800s are lucky to get 600GB native 1,000-1100 compressed). ...and that doesn't factor tape hardware costs, chip-in-tape costs, cleaning tape costs (oh, btw, how often are you using/replacing your cleaning tapes?) and more.

SATA ports have been on mainboards for nearly 10 years. IDE is a near 20 year old technology and IDE drives are still available. The format methods for disks are current, and data is EASILY migrated from one partition format to another. SATA 6 is backward compatible with SATA I drives and PCI IDE adapters cost about $15. (or USB external adapters)

Backups should not do 10 years without being migrated, and disk hardware 10m years from now is practically guaranteed to be available to read your disks, and legacy hardware is cheap and easily acquired. Tape hardware migrates to new formats every few years, can only be read in proprietary devices by proprietary software in most cases. Acquiring even a 5 year old legacy tape drive is near impossible, and new tape drives have significant issues reading any more than 1 previous tape generation. Migration to new tapes should happen every 3 years, at a cost of about $80/tape. HDD can go 7-10 years between migrations, at a cost of about the same per drive, but with greater capacity in most cases, easier migration tools, readily available, and drive sets can be RAID sets adding reliability and parity on inexpensive hardware.

Mean time between bit failure on a linear tape is 30 days.

That means 1 bit on that tape will be unreadable, or flipped, within 30 days. Assuming your tape uses parity writing, that's not much of an issue, but data failure may occur after a few months. This assumes lab quality storage conditions and treatment of the tape. imagine the same tape traveling in an iron box across town and back, and all the shuffling in warehouses and back to you eventually, not to mention the magnetic interference going up/down a few elevator shafts...

MTBF for bits on a HDD platter are measured in years, not days.