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Comment Network effect. (Score 1) 260

It's called the network effect: the benefits of all going to one single place outweigh the costs. Same as for going to the supermarket, using MS Office, speaking the same language... Facebook is mainly a blank slate, you put on it what you want (subdivided between audiences if you want) and link with whomever you want. Plus I'm not sure what the cost of going to FB is ? I don't do social networking, but if I did, I'd go to Facebook. Why bother with anything else when it's free, everybody's there, and there doesn't seem to be anything better around (G+ is a disgrace, the last few times I checked my "home" was mostly hangouts logs, which you can't turn off ?)

Comment No 2 ways about it (Score 2) 983

1- if you need to backup 20 TB today, you need to budget for 40TB in the medium term.
2- a backup is off-line, off-site, tested, and multiple. The "multiple" part is pricey, and the other 3 you can get cheapest with a PC filled with HDs. Or two (I'm making do with one). $200 for the BC, $150 per 4TB HD x 5 = $950. Hide that backup in a place safe from theft, floods, fire...

Comment I don't buy it (Score 1) 389

Actually, my elderly parents have the hardest time with Metro:
- no UI cues of what's clickable or not, what operations can be done
- no Back button
- very lacking apps
- very lacking live tiles
- very lacking Metro, you get dumped back into the Desktop all the time.

Metro was not designed for *any* user. It was designed to please the MS's drones' managers.

Comment About the hardware (Score 1) 168

missed the part about the hardware...

I'd go with a full-on PC, because it's only marginally more expensive than a NAS, and it doesn't suffer from a NAS's limitations and bugs, though it does require a bit more setup, especially because given the price of Windows licenses, you should probably go Linux.

You can find Atom motherboards with 4xSATA for $70. Add an enclosure, PSU, RAM, you're at $150 (HP sometimes have good deals on their ProLiant MicroServer). Then you need disks: add up all your data, multiply it by 2 for starters, and keep in ming you'll quickly be at x4.. a single 4TB disk leaves you with a lot more room for further expansions than 2x2TB, especially since performance is not a concern (so, no RAID).

Someone should buy an extra USB enclosure and fill it with disks for backups, to be done weekly and then disconnected and hidden away.

Comment BitTorrent Sync (Score 1) 168

BitTorrent Sync allows you to sync (2-ways) or backup (1-way) folders to PCs and devices (Windows, MacOS, Linux, iOS, Android) over the Internet. I'm using it to do backups for my family...
It doesn't encrypt by itself, but each OS has that option natively, and you can sync an already-encrypted (at the source) folder.

Setup is very easy: source adds the folder in BT Sync, generates a 1- or 2-way key, sends that over to the destination via email, sms, ...; destination creates a folder in the OS, than adds that folder to their BT sync and supplies the key.
You can do that for any number of folders.

Comment Re:Morons (Score 1) 564

Android has passable handling of keyboard and mouse (and touchpad and gamepad and remote; pretty much all USB and BT devices are supported). A fair bit is missing (CUA-like ctrl+x shortcuts, right clicks), but, again, most users don't use those that much. Logitech have multilink keyboards and mice that make switching from Wintel PC to Android PC instant, if like me you have both.

The most glaring issue is multi-windows, or at least dual-windows (PIP or split screen) like Samsung do on their tablets and high-end phones.

Actually Samsung have a $100 desktop dock (HDMI out, USBx2, power, and I think sound) for their latest Galaxy S, Note, and Mega... Since I want a Mega anyway, I'll probably try that out too.

Comment Re:Morons (Score 1) 564

My adult parents, sister, brother in law... don't do any of that on their PC. Their Spreadsheets are very basic, the Android stuff is enough for them: Excel != "all spreadsheets". They don't modify PDFs (to do do a bit of wordprocessing, emailing...) , and they do their taxes on-line.

Also, I'm not sure computers from the dawn of the computer age edited PDFs (PDFs != wordprocessing, again, there's an app for that), and Android does do the rest.

Android has some flash support, not everything works. Most sites have moved on, luckily.

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