40 tracks, 27 sectors per track (dual density only, 18 sec/track for single/double density), 128 bytes per sector (single/dual, 256 for double). Leading to:

• Single density: 90KB (back then a KB was still 1024 bytes for storage)
• Dual density: 135KB
• Double density: 180KB

Be sure to get a disk notcher so that you can use both sides of the disk. Also... get off my lawn.

You're obviously trolling, but rather than modding you down I'll reply to prevent the further spread of incorrect information.

1. A java interpreter is not a non-caching JIT compiler. Either it gets compiled into native machine code and run natively or it doesn't.

2. Java can be as fast as optimized C. If you've played around with C optimizations it should be pretty apparent that compiler optimizations already produce much faster code than what you could produce by hand-tuning. Java is no different in this respect. Where speed is really, really needed (such as with crypto libraries) the code is often done in assembly, not C.

Make a program in both C and Java, within the programs set an alarm to go off in 10 seconds and perform calculations until the alarm goes off. Then compare the results between C and Java. You might be surprised at what you find.

3. JIT can be faster than hand-written pre-compiled code. When you compile C you pick a target platform and let the compiler do what it can. A JIT compiler can optimize for your specific machine, your specific CPU and produce more optimal native code.

4. Considering today's PCs, the fact that Java makes building multi-threaded applications much easier than C/C++ means that even if Java is slower than C for a particular task/workload, that because it's so easy to leverage multiple CPU/cores it still might be faster than a C equivalent. Even so, most applications are not CPU-bound which makes it less of an issue, except to debunk the troll.

There are issues with Java (Swing performance and I/O scaling comes to mind) but code performance is not one of them.

FTP rides over TCP so it isn't really possible to "lose" data. However the default FTP transfer mode for Windows is ASCII. This means that if you're transferring binary data that some might not make it through as expected.

Change the FTP transfer mode to binary for the transfers and you won't have a problem. The command is "bin" once you have the FTP client open (assuming you're in interactive mode).

If you were to take apart a USB drive you might not find much to learn from. In general, today's machines are not as fixable as yesterdays and there is less reward for kids to try.

Unless the kids just like to break things. :)

Since you're focusing on Blizzard rather than on China let me correct you -- It's not illegal. You will not get arrested for doing it. It's against the terms of service, the rules you abide by to be able to play the game. If you come over to my house you must take off your shoes before using the hot tub. Those are my terms of service and if you break them I have the right to kick you out of my hot-tub or off of my property. But you won't get arrested.

Grinding gold to pay for repairs isn't fun. For casual gamers that wanted to see "end-game" they often bought gold to pay for their repairs. Certain aspects were certainly more fun, but the gold-centric aspects of the game were not.

Blizz did address it somewhat in the first x-pac. No more buying Golden Pearls to make that epic cloth item -- now you can simply run an instance and get the crafting material you need (as a drop) to craft your item. Now that those drops are no longer BoP the items have become much more of a commodity and the prices are reasonable due to sellers having competition in the auction house.

The change from making the crafting materials for epic items BoE also means that you don't have to grind instances for materials. Making gold is very easy (doing dailies nets about 400g per day) allowing you to obtain the item any way you want.

Now there are probably a few reasons Blizzard doesn't want gold selling:

1. Gold farmers were always quite annoying. Killing/camping quest mobs and such. Often they would cooperate on differing factions so that one would always be close to harass you (train mobs onto you, use a scroll (or whatever tricks they have to put you into combat also) then vanish.

2. They want you to play the game. To have gold allow you to buy something that it might take months to "earn" in-game is frustrating to those abiding by the ToS. A hint that perhaps the game should be more fun and less of a grind, but Blizz has an interest in keeping things balanced for those following the rules.

3. There are probably legal considerations for brokering (laundering) real money relatively anonymously.

4. People are giving out their account information to get powerleveled and to buy gold. Yes, to buy gold that could be sent in-game. People are getting hacked, messages posted on the forums (often pointing to malicious sites) to hack innocent people, etc.

There are plenty of boring parts of WoW that feel like a grind, which was the reason I stopped playing. However gold has lost its value. From Blizzard's perspective there simply is not a good reason for allowing it, and plenty of good reasons for not allowing it.

I don't know that single-manned air travel should really be thought of as much easier than sailboat.

A boat in the water will stay afloat unless something causes it to sink. A plane in the air will fall unless something causes it to fly.

I would sleep much better as the sole operator in a boat rather than the sole operator in a plane. In a boat the worst that's likely to happen is you've gone off-course. And even without GPS an experienced navigator will get back on track. In a plane the worst that's likely to happen is you suddenly wake up because you have this crazy dream that you're free-falling...

To the best of my understanding that is not true.

A civil case doesn't require a verdict to be unanimous, but the defendant is still considered innocent until found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

That last part is pretty important. It means you do not have to testify on your own behalf since it's prosecution's job to prove you guilty -- not your job to prove you're not. It does not mean that your property can't be siezed and used as evidence. You do not need to be found guilty before evidence is collected (with or without your explicit permission).

Having said that, you probably do want to testify (or have witnesses of your own) and collect/provide evidence on your own behalf. Any decent defense lawyer will be able to create a story that explains everything, even if it's not probable. I mean, can you prove that the boyfriend doesn't have a split personality and committed the crimes without consciously knowing it? Can you prove that someone didn't enter the house in the middle of the night while sleepwalking and do it? After all people have driven and had sex while sleeping, using a computer program is possible.

It's difficult to prove anything beyond all doubt. Sure it's possible someone broken into the house and used Kazaa, but I wouldn't recommend banking your freedom on the jury considering the remote possibility of something like that happening.

The public should lose the notion of "innocent until proven guilty" since it's not accurate. All the jury needs is reasonable doubt as to your innocence, that's it.

...And in deliberations the jury can weigh anything they want* and are not required to explain the rationale behind the decision. The jury determines what is fact, especially important considering that multiple witnesses will often recall different version of the same event, or different experts interpret the same evidence differently. Fact is what the jury determines to be the truth. If you wear an "I HATE JURORS" T-shirt to your trial the facts that determine the outcome may not be what you think they are.

By the way, anyone that gets out of jury duty doesn't know what they're missing. I found it enormously informative and interesting. :)

*The judge will give explicit instructions on what can be considered and how it should be considered (opening statements are not to be considered fact, etc). However once behind closed doors it's a "black box" and ultimately you do not need to explain to anyone how you arrived at your decision. As such it is safe to say that juries (while generally unbiased and not having a predisposition to intentionally disobeying the judges instructions) can consider anything they want.

The one throwing the chairs!

So Microsoft approaches Asus and says "Hey, let's do a joint advertising campaign. We'll fund $1M (totally made up number) towards the joint effort, whaddya say?" Then someone at Asus starts doing the math and says "Whoa, that's double what the whole advertising campaign would cost! Let's do this and pocket the difference!"

Microsoft gets advertising on Asus's site, may get a few more sales, may cause Linux to have slightly less market-share, and to them it's worth it. Asus gets free advertising and a cash bonus, to them it's worth it. It's not the first time Microsoft has done this, and in today's market who wouldn't take some free cash?

Now think about it a different way. What if the link was "It's Better with FreeBSD" instead of Windows -- would it also be a slap to Linux's face? Is the only non-slap to Linux the exclusive use of Linux?

Don't read more into what happened than what it is. Asus didn't turn its back on Linux. If you could make the product work on FreeDOS and were willing to pay for an advertising campaign (with cash positive results for Asus) I'm sure you could get your own link.

I knew I was forgetting something... The cable itself is composed of 4 pair of twisted wires. Make sure to maintain your twists as far as possible -- including into the RJ45 jack.

Maintaining the twists does make the process a bit harder (especially considering stranded isn't cooperative in the first place) and it's not uncommon for IT guys to take 10 minutes to make a proper cable. Although once you've done a few the process takes considerably less time.

If you're the type that needs to make a patch cable every month or so, you may find that the 10-15 minutes it takes you to properly make a cable isn't worth the $3-5 it would take to order one from the Internet!

There are two types of cable, stranded and solid core. Solid core is generally used for the horizontal cabling (from the patch panel to the jack at the user area), where stranded is used for the patch cables.

Solid core has slightly better propagation properties (the 100M limit implies solid core for example) however it also acts similar to a wire coat-hanger. Like any metal it weakens as it bends and after a period of time it'll grow weak, thin and even completely break.

Stranded is similar to a braided rope, it can withstand constant reconnections (user area, especially common with laptops), movements (telcom closets when you're moving the cable mess to access equipment ports) and the stress that will wear down the solid-core cables.

Do yourself a favor and make sure that if you create your own patch cables:

• Cable correctly. Know your color code, it makes future changes (such as to length) MUCH easier and the standards are in place for a reason. Ethernet uses pins 1, 2, 3, and 6 -- which match up exactly with the standard pinouts. Making your own pinout from left to right for example will not allow for cross-talk cancellation and will cause performance problems. Generally you want to match whatever standard your patch panel is, probably 568-B.
• Use stranded cable. It's more difficult to work with (it doesn't stay in place like solid core, making it more difficult to put the ends on) but you definitely want to do this.
• Use RJ45 connectors intended for stranded cable.

There's nothing wrong with making your own patch cables, and it could potentially save you big bucks (compared with buying a $35 patch cable at a local store). However if it's not done right you will kick yourself down the road -- or more likely blame the network electronics, server, network cards, or whatever you normally blame. :)

If you're old enough to remember back to how RAM above 640k was used in the DOS days, it was usually a RAM disk or disk cache (SmartDrv.exe). If you enabled write caching on SmartDrv.exe performance went way up, but of course you could lose data if you hit the RESET button before it had flushed.

... skip ahead a few years ...

Modern operating systems automatically cache data because it increases performance. Specifics of the size of the write cache and length of time before it's written to disk may vary, and each filesystem will have its own defaults.

EXT3 defaulted to committing data to disk after a maximum of 5 seconds. EXT4 increases that time to 150 seconds. (The exact numbers vary a bit, but you get the idea). Bottom line: When there is a system crash with EXT4 you notice losing data more often because there is a larger window of when data can get lost.

This is a very basic overview, but there are two groups weighing in on this:

Group 1: Things break under EXT4 that worked under EXT3!

Group 2: Look pal, it works fine. If you want your data committed right away so that you don't lose data maybe you should be calling fsync() so that the OS knows to commit your data? Because you know what, even with EXT3 you have data loss. It becomes more noticable with EXT4 because of the longer cache times, but the problem always existed!

Group 1: It worked before! And if commit our data immediately peformance drops!

Group 2: It didn't really work before, in laptop mode the EXT3 write time increases to 30 seconds. The problem has always existed! If you don't like taking the performance hit of committing data immediately, perhaps you shouldn't be writing so many tiny files so often!

Group 1: But it worked before! EXT4 is broken!

Group 2: Okay, look. You're obviously not listening. Why don't we make EXT4 behave more like EXT3 and do some auto-commits. Poorly coded applications will not lose data as often, and properly coded applications will not perform as well as they could.

Group 1: I'm taking this to Slashdot. EXT4 is teh suxx0rz!

Group 2: *sigh*

In all fairness regarding Exchange, things break on every release. My comments regarding backward compatibility were specifically regarding Windows the OS, not the Microsoft server applications. While there are some good ones (SQL) there are some terrible ones (Exchange, SMS) too.

Regarding performance, both APIs are functional. DirectX is more an interface to hardware where OpenGL is a generic interface that may or may not be hardware accelerated. Performance is driven largely from the drivers. In my experience games that support both DirectX and OpenGL perform better in DirectX. Does that mean it's better? No, maybe Nvidia does a better job with DirectX than OpenGL. Regardless, you can't say one is always clearly better than the other.

Your UAC rant is still misplaced. I don't know anyone who likes the implementation. But what does it have to do with performance, stability or backwards compatibility with other software? It was a bad implementation of a good idea. Well, assuming you don't want to fix security (and break compatibility) with the Win32 API it's about the best you can do. An example of how MS tried to band-aid a poor design problem maybe. An example of broken backward compatibility it is not.

Okay, I'll bite on automatic updates. It's not the best. Nor did I claim it was. apt-get is better and my personal favorite. Solaris is on-par with Windows in that it will detect a "major" update and won't detect patches for that major update until the next time the update is run (possibly after a reboot). I've seen the same thing with OS X (such as after an iTunes upgrade). Why does Safari or iTunes reboot the computer? I have no idea. Why can't all update software look ahead and see if there are patches to what it has planned to install/upgrade? I don't know. What I do know is that Windows Update is not alone. Patching NetWare servers has to be many times worse than Windows.

I'm not sure how you miss the point of Windows (the OS) not being compatible with anyone else. They want it that way. POSIX wasn't implemented for a reason. You can't switch out Windows and replace it with something else without a huge investment (time and/or money). I am crystal clear on the issue of why it's not compatible with other operating systems. I don't suspect that it will ever change. Why would they want to compete against UNIX on equal ground when they have their own API that UNIX can't implement (or when doing so breaks apps because the API doesn't function as is publicly documented)? The only reason to be compatible with another OS is if you want to move applications between them. Microsoft doesn't want to. So what is the point of an OS that isn't compatible with anyone else? Money. And lots of it. And if you have to deal with the public sector where .DOCs are the "standard" or have to access corporate web applications that only run in IE you see the point very clearly.

As far as rarely compatible with their own legacy software? Well Vista broke some things in an attempt to lock things down better. A lot of the problems are due to bad coding -- code which if ran in *NIX would also not work due to some dubious assumptions on the part of the developer. The difference is in that *NIX software developer know (and often prefer) that their software will not run as root. Much of the MS software out there requires that it be run as an administrator. When you start locking things down (non-root users in Linux, roles in Solaris, SELinux, CSA and Vista/UAC) bad software breaks.

I'm not a fan of Windows for many reasons. One of those reasons is backwards compatibility. It's really, really hard to "fix" security problems with a bad API when you carry forward that bad API into every future release. Sure, some of the really bad API is removed (and applications break) but most of it has carried forward. At the expense of security, it has definitely allowed for backward compatibility.

Let me start with saying that I'm no fan of MS. I'm Open Source friendly -- I have several projects on SourceForge, and have contributed effort to several additional projects. But what you've stated is FUD.

• WMI is supported on the newest Windows Servers, including Windows 2008.
• DirectX is stable (although the same can not be said for all video drivers) and is a fantastic API for games, with excellent documentation and examples available. Quite the opposite for OpenGL.
• UAC being the worst Vista feature is not only subjective, it offers no support for your argument.
• Automatic Updates may not be perfect, but it's not uncommon for an OS to require multiple updates (and reboots) to complete the patch cycle -- like Solaris 10 without LiveUpdate.

So having addressed the FUD, look at your main point. "Windows OS's become less compatible with other OS's and do not reap the benefit..." Windows has never tried to be compatible with other OS. When it comes to Windows compatability I would go so far as to say they've done a damn good job (possibly *too* good) considering the mess with which they're keeping backward compatibility and the crud that keeps getting carried forward.

Microsoft may have many faults, but you seem to have missed the mark.