How is using blu ray cheaper than hard drives?

3 TB will fit on 120 25-GB BD-Rs. At 40 cents each, that's $48 in media costs. If you do like I do and reserve 20% for dvdisaster error-recovery data, you're still only looking at $60.

A 3 TB WD Green will set you back $95. (Want to spring for the NAS-rated Red drives instead? That'll be $119. Their absolute cheapest 3 TB hard drives are a couple of models from Seagate and Toshiba at $90 each.)

The trick is getting BD media into the terabytes and getting it at a price point where it is decently affordable. For example, a 100 GB BDXL disk is $65, but it should be about 10% of that price in order to be a viable backup medium.

My last spindle of 25 GB BD-Rs cost me maybe $0.60 each or so. I could drive down to Fry's right now and pick up a spindle for about $0.80 each. A 4x increase in storage density isn't worth a two-order-of-magnitude increase in price. I would be surprised if Farcebook didn't arrive at the same conclusion.

Going by the numbers from the video in TFA, they're getting over 10k BD-Rs in a rack. While the basic concept isn't new, they appear to have developed it to a considerably higher density.

If they are storing their photos on facebook, they are doing it wrong.

FTFY. I can kinda understand posting stuff to Farcebook so others can view it, but using it as your primary storage medium? That's at least a dozen different kinds of wrong.

ALL AF bases and the majority of the the other services did away with base stickers several years ago and now everyone in the vehicle over the age of 16 has to display a valid Government issued ID to get on base.

All? I'd swear last time I accompanied my father (retired AF) on base at either Nellis or Wright-Patterson, the skycop just asked for his ID, not mine. It might be different overseas, and it's been different here at various times in the past, but unless they've changed things yet again since this past December, they most likely only care about the driver's ID.

any project or developer that uses it is going to need that backup repository at github anyway

You should have backups of all your projects to media that you control in any case. Google has a track record of winding down stuff it doesn't want to continue (Reader, anyone?), but if you're betting on any source-code repo to (1) not go tits-up (as Google Code might) and (2) not jump the shark (as SourceForge has), you're putting your code at risk. Git, in particular, makes it dead simple to clone a repo and all its history in a relatively compact form, so spare a few GB on a server you control for a mirror of everything you put on GitHub (or whatever).

....and not a word about TrueCrypt? is there any commonly used alternative or people just don't care?

I migrated to FreeOTFE right around the time that the TrueCrypt developers said people should stop using it, about a year ago. I haven't had much reason to migrate back (though TrueCrypt's hidden volume feature was nice to have).

Why does my Slashdot look exactly the same as it looked six months ago? I've been reading the outraged comments and I still see comments under the summary as always.

I don't know. Only my front page looks different, in the same ways people are complaining about

I almost never go to the homepage. I monitor /.'s RSS feed (used to use Google Reader, switched to TTRSS when Google Reader went bye-bye) and go directly to articles that sound interesting. A bunch of other sites are also configured in there, so I can quickly see what's new there as well.

As I've seen things, /. Beta fscked up page formatting for a while, but the "?nobeta" hack took care of that. Then at some point, it no longer became necessary when article pages started looking more or less like they previously did without manual intervention.

That's only if they were sealed correctly and stored right. There was an article a few years ago about how a lot of discs were coming up unusable after only 6-12.

My oldest CDs are somewhere on the other side of 20 years old now, and not one of them has gone bad. I reripped them all a few months ago as part of a transition from AAC to FLAC. They've spent most of their time on a shelf indoors, though they've been in a box in the garage (dry, but subject to the temperature fluctuations typical for Las Vegas) for the past four years.

I suspect that as long as your CD collection never spent time in a flooded basement, it'll be good to go for decades to come.

What API would you use?

WebRTC, IIRC. I recently rolled out a webapp at work that case workers can use to help determine eligibility for potential clients. One minor capability within it is photo capture. Along with a slew of questions about demographics, disabilities, and such, it'll also take a picture and stash it in the database. If someone is then accepted as a client, that photo is then available so that (for instance) our delivery drivers can compare the photo on file to whoever answers the door to make sure the client's at home to accept delivery. We could've just had the user take a picture with the phone's camera app and then upload into our webapp from there, but this is a seamless approach that's easier to use.

There's not much to it, either. The page that handles the capture is 28 lines of HTML and 114 lines of JavaScript, a fair bit of which was cribbed from examples I found with a few seconds' googling. It provides a live view of what the camera sees, lets you switch between front and back cameras, and lets you preview the capture before it's sent to the server.

So you will have to 'structure' it into smaller pieces.

...and if you try doing that and end up getting caught, the feds'll send you away to PMITA prison.

Now, take a teenager, and try to explain punching holes in a 360K 5.25" floppy so you could flip it and get 720K.

360K is already double-sided. A more typical use case was to double capacity from 140K to 280K when used with an Apple II.

I want to know why Putin fucks goats and why all evidence has been erased

Because they were MALE goats and we all know Putin's stance on all things gay.

Wide?

Plex’s lack of extensibility, scraper support, and local storage support drive me up a goddamn tree, but Plex works and XBMC doesn’t. I’m not a linux person, but I am a nerd - code is not my day job, but I’m teaching myself at night. Sweet baby Jesus, I tried XBMC so many freaking times that eventually I just gave up.

The easiest way to get XBMC^H^H^H^HKodi working is OpenELEC. It's pretty much an appliance that just works; the only part that remains slightly tricky (and not by much) is setting up a shared database if you want more than one. I have it set up on an Acer Aspire Revo in the living room and a Raspberry Pi in the bedroom; each is set up with a Playstation 3 Blu-ray remote control (about $20 each, plus a Bluetooth dongle).

I also have Plex up and running, but it's mainly for remote access. Automatic transcoding is a big win. Around home, though, there's more than enough bandwidth to just let OpenELEC grab files straight off the server.