(fanboi warning)
Origin PC. I'm north of four years on my EON-17. Yes, it's a Clevo chassis, but they're easily serviceable, and fiercely supported. For the most part, Macbooks are cheaper than the base units of each series, and if you're looking for the less-expensive route to the same thing, go with Sager - Sager is the unaffiliated,"drop-ship the hardware" Clevo rebadger, and Origin is more the "we have your back no matter what, and will custom paint your rig and install your software and test it out for you" option, with each company's pricing reflecting these respective stances. Either way, if you can deal with the weight and the less-than-stellar battery life, and you like laptops that make tinkering possible, and money isn't a consideration, then they're your answer. I don't work for them, and I don't own their stock, but I'll never buy a laptop from anyone else.

David,

Thanks for responding here. You sure don't see the guys over at Comcast responding directly to the Slashdot crowd, so respect there.

One thing I've been hoping that OpenDNS would adopt is the system that FoolDNS uses to thwart tracking and redirects. I'll be honest and say that I switched my router's DNS addresses to FoolDNS for that reason. Is there any meaningful discussion within OpenDNS to provide a service like this?

Thanks!

Behold: someone's already thought of that: http://i0.wp.com/leadershipfor...

By that definition, *you* don't trust it, but Chuck Norris would be able to trust it for about twenty kilometers.

HP's business grade laptops are fairly decent, but there's a pretty good reason for that - when you're selling a 3 year soup-to-nuts service plan on it as a standard feature, you're going to spend the extra $50 to ensure you're not replacing it in two years.

Consumer units are a different story. Head inside one if you get a chance. Instead of wire channels, you'll literally find scotch tape. Everyone I've ever known with an ENVY line laptop has an overheating problem that will trigger a thermal shutdown because they didn't use enough copper to make an effective heatsink. The one guy I know who can go all day without a thermal trigger doesn't game on it, and has a chill mat with strategically placed props to allow hot air to flow off of it. By contrast, my old Dell XPS M1730 was able to cool two GPUs and a Core 2 Duo processor, under load, with fan levels that were rarely audible. My current Origin EON17 (a discontinued model) is much better built and has a nice service panel where most of the core components can be easily accessed.

Head to Google and check out "dv9000". That was their 17" laptop from 2006-2007ish, and literally every one I've ever come across has had the left hinge fail. In my case, repeatedly. This was again due to poor construction of the heat dissipation systems that weakened the hinge until it cracked, because the left hinge started to become a de facto heatsink itself.

When I direct someone to buy a laptop, It's either Lenovo (Thinkpads aren't what they used to be but they still have pretty solid construction), Asus (performance on a budget), Apple (if they're eyeballing one anyway because they've already made up their mind) or Origin (performance without a budget). On rare occasion a Probook will catch my eye at Microcenter and I'm thinking that it may be worth rolling the dice, but would I recommend consumer grade HP? No...and I wouldn't recommend CG Dell, Acer, or Toshiba, either.

Unreal tournament will be a very interesting case study over the next year or two, because there are a lot of different variables that don't apply to mobile gaming.

First, a few questions regarding the market model:
1.) Will the game be sufficiently open source that you can download the source, write in the MindPrison Content Market, and distribute the recompile? Android technically lets you do this, but short of Amazon, no market has taken hold since Google Play comes on literally every Android phone sold through carriers. Unreal Tournament is not as similarly beholden.
2.) If it's not that free, will it be possible for modders to release their maps independently, and for players to install them without going through the market? Also different from the mobile market since every UT release ever has had this system in place; users only familiar with iOS will be confused but I see the overlap between the two markets as vanishingly small.

Next, a few differences with the TRUE market. F2P games are, ultimately, marketing to players. Unreal Tournament makes money another way: directly through Unreal Engine 4 subscriptions and the gross revenue therefrom. $20/month per subscriber starts to add up when we add in all the modders and map makers. Similarly, the next Gears of War release will make Epic a fortune with that 5% gross revenue thing happening. Epic doesn't need to make a killing from players in order to get their hookers and blow. Unreal Tournament is a tech demo for the engine and a low-barrier-of-entry for indi developers to get started.

Finally, the Epic Games that released Unreal Tournament 3 was pretty awesome. Why? Because despite not selling as many copies of that year's Call of Duty release, the folks over at Epic Games did release five update packs including the Titan pack (which had several modifiers, new gameplay modes, and new maps) for free, a year and a half after its release. It was also the only game I'm aware of that had a full plastic-disc release that never required an internet connection but also let players put their CD key into Steam and get all the wonderfulness of having the game on Steam. You don't see that kind of dedication from Activision and while it's been quite some time, I'd at least like to think that some of those people are still in charge of making decisions here. I'm fully aware that it's an unreasonable amount of optimism to have, but what can I say - I have hope.

The worst part is that they ditched the two half-decent products they HAD - PartitionMagic was excellent in its day, and Ghost 2003 was a great tool as well. Symantec discontinued both,leaving Acronis and OSS to eat their lunch in both departments. Alas, the dark side of chasing after subscriptions. ...and, shocker of shockers, they're offering 'cloud storage' now. I'm just waiting for 7-11 to start doing that.

Check out "Copilot". It's $8 (for the North American version; other regions are a bit more expensive if memory serves), and downloading maps is its claim to fame. You download the maps for the regions you need via wifi, and it navigates you without ever needing a data connection. It also has traffic redirection like Waze, which is free for the first year and some trivial amount thereafter. It reads turn-by-turn directions via the Android TTS engine, so any voices you have for it will work.

The caveats are that map updates tend to be released quarterly (a problem if you're looking for that super-new restaurant the next town over) and that addresses tend to be a bit weird - you can paste a full address, but it does its internal database queries based on 'drilling down', so it asks for city/state, then street name, then house number, in that order, which takes some getting used to.

Still, Google Maps has indeed gone to hell in a handbasket, especially for me who have this bizarre notion that "using Google for search, maps, and apps" does not equate to "I want to buy into every aspect of the Google ecosystem, everywhere, ever". Google makes it bloody hard to make that possibility practical.

It's not a matter of being an 'idiot' to believe that there is a difference between sharing that you liked a single, particular film, and having one's entire viewing history available for public view. It is entirely reasonable to assume that there are two separate actions required to share the different sets of data.

Amazon = Buy 'n Large. I think that answers this and basically any other question about Amazon, ever.

Because Asurion. Handset insurance almost invariably involves refurbished units. If the baseband of one phone is broken, but the mainboard of another is okay, which IMEI do you use? The answer is to scrap them both and generate a new one on the refurbished unit. Even for the phones that don't support this, it is still technically a "different phone" that has its cracked screen replaced, because if that phone then needs an insurance replacement, retaining the IMEI will garner a "but this phone has already been replaced" situation. If the IMEI changes, it makes it all but impossible for refurbs to be reliably done.

I think that's where "law of diminishing returns" comes into play. The things you're discussing are wonderful and fascinating and have plenty of implications in science. However, researching exoplanets is only possible with orbiting telescopes or the VLA or Arecebo...the kinds of things that can find stuff, but "bigger than that" will be required to find the next thing.

The first telescopes used a pair of lenses, then mirrors, then finely-created mirrors, then a high quantity of parabolic radio dishes, then really really really big mirrors - launched into orbit. Two lenses were (roughly) affordable by the common man. Mirrors, also affordable by the common man who had a tax return. Then a wealthy hobbyist or dedicated scientist, then a research lab, then a country.

The difference between "how much it costs for the stuff to find new stuff" and "how much new stuff that really expensive stuff will be found" are the questions at hand. We live in an infinite universe, so there's an infinite number of discoveries to be made. It just starts to cost impractical amounts of money after a while.

(and yes, I'm aware that my history of the telescope is grossly oversimplified and incredibly glazed over. This is a Slashdot post, not a thesis.)

Sorry for the dumb question, but are you certain that FTP and/or SSH is enabled in the WebUI? I don't recall if FTP is enabled by default, but I know for a fact that SSH is disabled unless explicitly enabled.

If so, go to Western Digital's website as I know they've had a few firmware updates for the drives in recent history. Try running those firmware upgrades if you can and see if it solves your problem.

I like FTP as much as the next Slashdotter, but it's not a perfect overlap to the same problem that Dropbox/Gdrive/UbuntuOne solves.

FTP doesn't do delta syncs. While this is okay for a 50KB text file or even a 2MB spreadsheet, transferring a 1GB file in its entirety is undesirable.
FTP requires an "intentional transfer". You save locally, then you upload remotely. U1 et al does this as a single step.
FTP requires an open port on the receiving end, which is not always possible (e.g., public/corporate Wi-Fi). These services handle NAT traversal seamlessly.
FTP is sometimes blocked on residential internet connections. U1 is not.
FTP can only share files with another user if its structure is designed to accommodate it. Dropbox can share files using a simple "share" command (I don't know if U1 supports this).
FTP on mobile devices is a nightmare, either because iOS gets weird with its attempts to hide the "complexity" of a file system, or because Android doesn't. Again, Dropbox makes this seamless, but I don't know if U1 does this any better.

Like I said, I really like FTP, because it's very quick, no storage limits, and is a very minimalist protocol that has withstood the test of time. There are, however, very valid reasons for the success of services like Ubuntu One and Dropbox.