Not exactly. Think of it this way: Western Digital handles NAT traversal and Dynamic DNS. The bright side is that buyers don't have to mess with their routers to make the drive work and then sign up for DynDNS or somesuch in order to remotely access it. For a LOT of non-Slashdotters, this is a good thing.

Naturally, this also means that once the service that streamlines that process goes down, people's remote access to their data goes down. Think of it like having Filezilla Server installed on your desktop with port 21 forwarded/translated to it from your router. Then, while you're out, someone at home factory resets the router and loses your config. Same principle.

The "Cloud" part is the "always on, available everywhere" part of the equation, complete with a mobile app. the "My" part is that your data still lives at your house, on your hardware, and Western Digital doesn't have access to it. The drive is marketed this way because its ability to do Samba, FTP, and SSH (and the fact that it runs a small Linux stack so you can run rsync and BT Sync with some command line magic) out of the box just fine without ever signing up for Western Digital services doesn't exactly scream "Buy Me!!!!111" to most consumers. Think of it like a pre-assembled, single-drive FreeNAS that doesn't support iSCSI or NFS and uses EXT4 (I think), that also has a "hold my hand mode" for people who are confused about things like "file systems" and "not getting software through an app market of some kind".

I came here to reiterate basically this. The MyCloud devices do use WD services, but essentially what Western Digital does is perform relay services and dynamic DNS, for users who don't know how to do port forwarding and NAT translation (and/or have outbound port 80 blocked on their residential line) but still want a pretty app on their iPhone. Samba/CIFS still works perfectly on a LAN despite the outage. It's also entirely possible to use the MyCloud device if you are willing to use FTP/SSH when out and about, or with a little command line magic, get BitTorrent Sync up and running on those drives - it takes less than ten minutes of cutting and pasting into Putty.

Even if the WD services never come back, the only thing that is gone is the convenience factor. Now to be fair, that's a huge selling point of these drives that makes them more expensive than equal-capacity USB volumes. I understand the frustration of building a workflow around a feature set prominently displayed on the box, and I'm not saying that Western Digital doesn't have a responsibility to get their act together. At the same time, the fact that there are very time tested methods of accessing the data without the service, so it's a very different scenario than, say, Dropbox going down for a week or Google deciding to throw in the towel with Google Drive.

In fairness, the answer to this question is:
"People with the completely reasonable desire to physically interact with a laptop before they purchase it, but don't live reasonably close to a Microcenter or a Fry's or an Apple store (if they want a Macbook)."

Unfortunately, Best Buy is still more plentiful and advertises much more than the other places that sell laptops retail. Amazon and Newegg are wonderful, but you won't be able to feel whether the keyboard is comfortable or not, and the answer is so highly subjective that reviews aren't worth much, either. Spec sheets don't tell the whole story, and unless you're either close enough to a store that specializes in laptop sales (like Microcenter), rich enough to buy a laptop from a boutique seller (like Origin PC or Falcon Northwest), or simply don't care (at which point even Best Buy units are acceptable), Best Buy is kind of "it".

ugh, first attempt bit-bucketed...

1.) Google hasn't done a terribly good job at explaining what Glass DOES do. This very blog post focuses on what it does NOT do. Let's assume I buy everything the blog post says, hook/line/sinker. $1,500 to avoid having to pull out my phone in the event of a text message doesn't seem terribly useful to me. Identifying buildings or navigation overlay might be a useful example of how this tech works, but given the 'all walks of life' thing they're trying to express, the single biggest thing they could do to allay the "all photos all the time" problem is to give us a list of things Glass *can* do, besides taking pictures. This is already blazed trail - 15 years ago, GPS in a phone was creepy...and then we were able to ditch our TomToms for Waze, we were able to have our phones automatically text our friends when we were nearby, we were able to be guided through mass transit systems, and we were able to figure out what movies were playing in the nearest cinema, even if we were on vacation. Suddenly, wearing a GPS was acceptable, to the point where 'checking in' and explicitly telling the world where we were was a 'thing'. Focus on why I'd want to own one, not why I wouldn't want others to own one.

2.) My other problem is Google. My friend and fellow Slashdotter Rob keeps telling me that Google is about the safest place for my data to be, aside from my own server. I, personally, see Google making it far too easy to get far too much personal data from users. Even if they're not presently evil, if they decide to go down that road, they've already got the infrastructure, run their competitors out of town, and have years of data they can mine. Glass without Google's internet services is like Geordi's visor to Data - technically functional, but worthless in practice. The person may have accidentally taken a photo of me, and I generally wouldn't care...but why is Google pushing the product? Again, even if the people at the helm would actively stand against using it as a raw surveillence tool, they won't be there forever. I don't trust Glass photos to be taken, but not geotagged, uploaded, and analyzed. "An inadvertent photo of me" is one thing. "An inadvertent photo of me, time stamped and geotagged, uploaded to Google" is something else entirely.

Well, the fact of the matter was that CoD and Battlefield proved that it's far more profitable to released a game with a dozen maps, then charge $15 a pop for a half a dozen new maps every three months, than to equip players to make their own and circulate them around the internet for free.

What bothers me the most is the complete lack of LAN play. Everything wants you to make an account and join a server and do all this matchmaking crap, when all I want to do is play against my friends, in the same room, by typing an IP address. Relatively few games within the past few years support this anymore, and I remember a friend and I sitting down for fifteen minutes trying to figure out how the hell to play against each other on Crysis 3... >.

It seems to be in development by the same team feverishly coding Half-Life 3.

http://www.kdramastars.com/art...

Unfortunately, I too pine for a new Unreal Tournament release, though it seems that Epic would much rather I spend my money on Gears of War instead :/.

The alternative, from EA's perspective, is accounting hell. Suppose you say that it's 10% of "net gain". Most would consider it reasonable to consider payroll something that would be deducted before EA's share, but suppose you're a single-op game developer, and you make a game that grosses $100,000. Suppose that after you've paid for your website, your bandwidth, your equipment, your Amazon EC2 instances, your Visual Studio licenses, refilled your Google AdWords account, and paid your electric bill, you've got $30,000 left over. Now since you're a single-op, you can write yourself a $30,000 payroll check. Epic now gets nothing, even though you've grossed $100,000 and netted $30,000, because you turned your profits into a payroll check. Conversely, Blizzard and EA can do soup-to-nuts Hollywood Accounting that shows that Titanfall and Starcraft 2 have both never made a cent.

Now what Epic could have done was to create a 'floor' - the first combined $100,000 gross, for example, wouldn't be 'taxable', and after that it's a 5% gross income. That seems like the least objectionable method to me; let a company make a few bucks before you start charging for it, while still ensuring that Mass Effect 4 makes them a cool six figures.

If Epic demonstrated the capabilities of this engine by also having a first-party game released along with it. They could make it a multiplayer first person shooter, which I know is a well-trodden field, but I really think Epic could do it - especially one that includes LAN play, which seems to be poorly represented in games these days. And then, they could bundle a few of the tools with the game so that some gamers could make their own content for it, and do something really earth-shattering - user-generated DLC, FOR FREE!

If only I could think of a name for this game....

This may actually be a good thing...and I can't believe I'm actually saying that about a Cloud Computing (tm) product...but roll with me for a minute; I think this may be a worthwhile system for them to be using...

1.) Onenote's first release was back in 2003. After over ten years of existence, plenty of people still don't know what it is. Onenote was originally intended to be the killer app for tablets (back when they all had pens and keyboards and were running Windows XP Tablet PC Edition...). Why not do whatever it takes to get it on Tablets?

2.) The Slashdot crowd cares a lot about privacy. Most computer users don't. Most computer users upload data to Dropbox and Google Drive without hesitation. The requirement of storing their data on Microsoft's mothership will likely be even less of a concern. If anything, users are more likely to be better served by a system that doesn't require them to be involved with file sync management hell, or worried about losing all their notes once "click of death" comes to a hard disk near them.

2b.) If privacy is of greater concern than one's money, it's possible to buy Office 2013 outright, or hit The Pirate Bay. The fact that there is a free cloud-only option, thankfully, did not preclude Microsoft from selling the locally saving flavor.

2c.) I haven't tested this, but I do wonder if it's possible to download one's OneNote notebook from the OneDrive once it's stored there...it seems logical for the two-step method to work...

3.) Onenote can really shine with the collaboration and seamless syncing. If Microsoft does it right, I think it will give them some good PR to have a Onenote notebook seamlessly work between a user's iPhone, Android tablet, Windows laptop, and web browser. I think that, if there were any particular program that lent itself to a cloud sync method of replication, it's OneNote - Unlike Word and Powerpoint, which use self contained document files, Onenote is more like Outlook in that notebooks are more database/PST-like single mammoth files. Sharing individual pages via The Cloud (tm) will be much easier than some sort of import/export version hell. All of this together, I think, makes Onenote more useful than just "a five subject notebook on a computer".

4.) Microsoft's other gain here is (potentially) an uptick in people actually using their whole Microsoft account - OneDrive, Outlook.com, and Office Web Apps. If Onenote is free in exchange for also using those other services, then I think that this method of "enticing users to get a Microsoft account" is less objectionable than their method of "enticing users to use the Metro UI". Even if a user never uses a single Microsoft property besides Onenote, they still get 7GB of storage...and a 7GB Onenote notebook is a rather large piece of data...

Bonus point: Google requires a Gmail account in order to use QuickOffice, even if you intend on storing a document locally. It's bad when they do it as well, I'm just saying that there's precedent for an application to still require login and that it wasn't Microsoft who started this trend.

All in all, as much as I hate storing things in The Cloud (tm), I think that the benefits for most people make it less objectionable for the masses than it is for us Slashdot folk.

I've done pretty close already:

http://i.imgur.com/yz13tnR.png

All that's in there is a spanned RAR archive of a 10GB file consisting solely of the output of a windows variant of /dev/random, password protected using a full 64 character alphanumeric/symbolic password from GRC.

I tip my hat to your multiple levels of encryption, but I'm glad to know that somewhere out there, Google has redundantly stored about 9GB of completely useless data.

Now what DOES work well for Tesla is the blank check they'll get for making it. However, it will end up having a whole lot of redesign involved. Even if you tripled the battery pack's size, is it a linear gain for a vehicle that's somewhere around triple the weight of their existing models? Methinks not. The "in-flight refueling" truck situation has its own can of worms - you'd need a mobile charging unit capable of giving it enough juice to justify the trip in just a few minutes...I'm pretty sure that despite thirty years of work regarding power generation, we're still stuck with bolts of lightning and plutonium from Libyan nationalists to generate 1.21 gigawatts...neither of which are exactly 'portable', and all of THEM will have to be powered with something, so either you're simply offshoring the oil combustion, or "it's turtles all the way down".

Meanwhile, you'd need not just one of these things, but a dozen - remember that Tesla would have to build the decoy units, too...which means you'd also need a dozen refueling trucks. If you ditch all of that, then you'll have a fairly short range you'll be able to go, which will defeat most of the purpose of getting the limo replaced.

And after all of that...exactly what does that net Tesla? Are they looking to make alternatives to the Ford F150 or similar (justifying the work done on making a Tesla engine that can move that kind of weight)? Would it be a foot-in-door to get military contracts (justifying the R&D on an armored Tesla)? Could the charge-en-route tech be adapted for AAA tow trucks? ...Or would Uncle Sam simply pay for all the R&D because the tech needed for this project to work is so vastly different than Tesla's existing designs that monetizing them independently of the limo contract will prove impractical?

To be fair, plenty of the anorexic laptops being sold these days have shed the ethernet port (obnoxiously, most of the sub-$500 laptops only have 10/100 NICs...), and phones and tablets are wi-fi or cellular only; wired isn't even an option for them.

The Slashdot crowd knows them well. Joe Sixpack still thinks he needs to pay $99 for a Monster Cable. As long as people buy HDMI cables from Best Buy, there is room for Monoprice to exist.

Personally, I go to Monoprice to buy, not to browse. Their website is designed for this, and wonderfully so. The retail side of things could take care of the other half.

HDMI cables are, in fairness, a high-margin item that can tolerate higher latency. However, Monorprice sells plenty of other things - routers, speakers, security cameras, monitors, home theater receivers...really, they're not unlike Radio Shack of the 80's, they're just known best as the place where you can get a kilometer of ethernet cable for half the price of Home Depot.

I concur that ordering online mostly works, most of the time. At the same time, if Sony, Microsoft, Bose, and Harmon Kardon can justify having retail stores, then I postulate that brick-and-mortar isn't as dead as Amazon wants you to think it is.

I subscribe to a service called PrimeCuts. It's a service that gets music in the hands of mobile DJs and radio stations, with the full blessing of the RIAA (not that I necessarily desire to be in the RIAA's good graces, but if the Tannenbaum and Thomas-Rasett cases prove anything, it's that they aren't fair regarding noncommercial infringement, thus, commercial infringement in the context of being a mobile DJ would involve that much less fairness...). I cannot (legally) sell the CDs they send me on eBay. I'm pretty sure I can't even legally give them away, for free, even as a permanent transfer. My only recourse, should I wish to absolve myself of the CDs, is to sell my DJ business. The discs are a business asset and they can be permanently transferred as a part of the whole business being transferred, but not as discs by themselves. I think that there is merit to some sort of parallel in this case.

Usual not-a-lawyer disclaimers apply, but my logical reasoning says that a permanent transfer of the iTunes account would allow for digital content to be used by the beneficiary of the will. The apps/music/videos are still tied to the same iTunes account and aren't being transferred between accounts (a requirement for your 'secondary market' analogy to apply), but the account is being used by the beneficiary of the will. Now, for this to work, there needs to be a few things determined:

1.) is digital content given to an account, or a human?
1a.) If account, is it a reasonable argument that since the iPad was left, that the account is an inexorable part of the device? e.g. if a house is stated in a will, but the keys are not, is the beneficiary thus not allowed to enter the house?
1b.) If human, does the Apple EULA explicitly state that the rights cannot be transferred within a will? If so, it seems grounds for a court battle, since intellectual property is transferred all the time as a part of a will - art, vinyl records, DVDs, computer software on plastic disc, etc. Is there sufficient legal precedent to state that content purchased from Apple is not subject to the same laws that allow DVDs to be subject to the terms of the will?
2.) Could it be argued that the only reason this case exists is because there is a passcode on the device, without which, Apple probably wouldn't have been contacted in the first place?
3.) It is entirely possible that there are notes, voice memos, photos, and videos that were generated by the deceased, not by Apple or its licensors. Apple's withholding of the passcode prevents the user from accessing that data, which seems like shaky ground as well.

Then again, this is the problem with 'magic boxes' - people don't quite understand exactly how things interrelate, which means that things that aren't explicitly specified are subject to ambiguity for no reason.