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Comment Re:That was quick, but normal (Score 1) 454

Well, I think it's a bit far fetched to call kids that go through their archival phase (which is a compensation behaviour) a valid use case.
Yes it's nice that they can. But it normally cools down with age and generally even those kids have a hard time explaining to anyone why they need a video and audio collection that rivals video-stores or radio-stations.

1TB holds 250 dvd-rips without compression. Or roughly 1000 full-length movies in the more common compressed form (divx etc.).
That's good for one year of constant consumption of three movies per day (about 6 hours), every day...

Consequently I think even these part-time pirates will stop caring at some point in the near future, simply because they won't be able to fill the drive up before their spleen ends.

Comment Re:Spyware, Adware, Antivirus, Don't use IE, Use a (Score 1) 295

The key difference is that the Unices have had a security model from day 1 while windows started as a single-user system.
Linux alone (not counting other Unices) is approaching 20% market-share in the server market which is potentially more attractive to malware writers because the hosts are usually better connected and better equipped. The reason we rarely see botnets span significantly into the server-area is not that the bad guys wouldn't be trying (look at your server-logs sometime) or because the average server-admin was better qualified (look at the millions of broken default installs from various hosting providers). The reason is that it's, on average, a much harder target.
Unix systems have proper firewalling, capability constraints, process accounting etc. built in. They're more transparent and easier to harden - which is exactly what would happen if we'd start to see more widespread attacks.

The mechanics of software security are not exactly rocket science when layered bottom up. Windows is troubled because they basically sprinkled one thin layer of "security powder" on the outside of an otherwise wide open core. Consequently your "personal firewall" is implemented as an afterthought and can be trivially bypassed from an unprivileged account. Such tricks are a bit harder to pull off on OSX or linux.

Comment Re:Disappointing (Score 1) 545

Yes and yes. Interesting to hear that click-to-focus is not mandatory anymore? And windows don't necessarily raise to top anymore when they receive focus? That may be worth a second look then. These two points constantly nuts when trying to work with many windows.

And with magic titlebar I mean the top titlebar, yes. It leads to funny effects when you're not sure which app is currently focussed and I never understood the advantage of putting app-contextual options so far away from the app. It just has never stopped feeling "wrong" to me.

Comment Re:Disappointing (Score 5, Interesting) 545

Understanding the motivation behind the way the operating system UIs work will probably go a long way to reducing my frustration in the future.

Good luck with that, didn't work for me.
I still use my macbook occassionally and I still hate their separation between window and application switching.
In general, when I "ALT-TAB" (or "CMD-TAB" fwiw) then I want to quickly browse through all windows that are available to me. The UI is invited to provide a smart ordering for me (i.e. show other windows of the current application first) but the mental effort of distinguishing between a "window switch" and an "app switch" never worked for me.

But frankly OSX as a whole just isn't for me - even though I really wanted to like it and literally worked for 2 months straight only on my MacBook in an attempt to learn it. The semantics of the dock are still counter-intuitive to me and showstoppers like mandatory click-to-raise or the absurd "magic titlebar" ultimately made me go back to my linux desktop.

Comment Re:Coming to a disaster near you. (Score 1) 452

Well, I don't know what a statistical relevant sample size is but we're not talking 2 or 3 offbrand drives here but more like 10-20 per year and roughly a hundred seagates. The offbrands do regularly sneak in when seagate is either not in stock or when someone makes us a good deal "but only with these nice WDs".

It's obviously still anecdotical evidence but we *do* take notice when a seagate fails because it happens so rarely. And that's with about 700 seagates and maybe 100 offbrands deployed right now.

Comment Re:Coming to a disaster near you. (Score 5, Insightful) 452

I will.
Shit like this happens from time to time, read up on IBM's legendary "deathstar" fiasco to see how to really turn such a thing into a PR disaster.

Seagate on the other hand is acknowledging the issue and seems to be communicating about it as open as possible. Plus they offer RMA and recovery services. What more can they do, really?

We have bought almost exclusively seagate for our S-ATA disks over the past 5 years because their failure rate has consistently been lower than that of the competition. They have a reputation to lose and it seems like they're trying their best to keep it.

I see no reason why one screwed up model should remove my trust in a company that has served us well for so long. Cut them some slack and compare your historic failure rates of seagate drives versus others.

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