If you are looking for long term storage, that is what M-Disc is made for.
http://www.mdisc.com/

Writable DVDs and Blu-rays use an organic coating that degrades over time. M-Disc says you only have up to 7 years of reliability before you start loosing data. A pressed CD/DVD will last up to 100 years, but I've had pressed music CDs that the media layer burned from very little use. Also pressed CD/DVD/Blu-rays are not practical for backup.

Hard drives are designed to be spinning. M-Disc claims hard drives are good up to 5 years, but if you don't spin them up every once in a while, they can fail in less than a year.

Flash Memory they say is up to 8 years. Again, if it isn't powered up every once in a while you can only be sure everything will be there for 2 years. If it is an SSD, your information can disappear any second. The SSD will still work fine, but they sometimes just loose everything on them.

Backup tapes have been the tried an true form of long term backup, but even those, people suggest having at least 1 backup of the backup as magnetic material degrades over time.

That is the problem with Windows 10, you don't know what will still run on it.

When I downgraded to Windows 8 from 7 I could not play The Sims Medieval, Diablo 2 and a few other games. My Blu-ray player no longer worked, even though it was supported on Windows 8. The Blu-ray player problem turned out to be a missing system DLL caused by me upgrading to Windows 8 instead of doing a fresh install.

My prediction for Windows 10 is that more games and software will not work. Will it be something you use? Who knows.

The other fun thing was with Windows 8 my boot time increased from about 45 seconds to 90 seconds. Probably to do with upgrading instead of fresh install, but it takes a long time to get everything setup after a fresh install.

My computer died and I am happily running Windows 7 on the new one.

In Canada, once you have paid for a license of a movie, it is legal to rip it from a physical copy, or download a digital copy.
In Canada when you play money, you have to get something in return in the form of a physical item, a license, a limited license, or a service.
Home videos were going to be under the physical item category originally. The problem the MPAC had with this is that legally, in Canada, you cannot put any restrictions on what people do with an item that is labeled as physical.
The MPAC wanted home videos only to be used for private showings, thus they lobbied to have home videos be classified as a license. The problem they have now is that you own a license to watch that performance of the movie. If you have a VHS copy of The Jungle Book, it is legal for you to download the 1080p version and watch it.
The movie studios, or record companies, can get around this a bit by coming out with modified versions of the movies, or music. There is a threshold for how much change there needs to be for this to happen.
Also Herr Harper passed a law making it illegal to teach other people how to crack encryption. Though cracking the encryption for personal use is not illegal.

Basically, if you buy a movie, you own a license to view that performance, doesn't matter how you get it. Higher quality transfers, or remastering are generally still considered the same performance.

HEIR HARPER!!!

Sorry, sorry, sorry. The supreme court appointed by Herr Fuhrer Harper calls the shots.

No, it just adds Human Breast Milk Cheese to the toppings list.

You mean like this?
http://www.nasaspaceflight.com...

Two of their engines have blown caught fire, or blown up on the test harness. This adds a third explosion. They have successfully launched 3 times. Thus 3 time engines have blown up and 3 successful launches. Depending on how you look at this you will get different percentages.

4 engines have been destroyed, 6 have operated to their objective. You could also look at it as there are 3 disasters and 3 successes. You could also look at it that there have been 3 successful launches and 1 failed launch.

The way I look at it is that Orbital has cost NASA probably a few billion dollars in failures, and thousands of man hours. Two of those failures have been this year. I would call that pretty abysmal.

Windows 8 Start screen sucks for organizing lots of programs. If I go to someone else's computer trying to find the desktop icon can be difficult. Actually with the live tiles most things are the obviously with just glancing at them. According to research done by Microsoft, switching contexts is confusing and non-intuitive, which is exactly what the start screen is.
Metro applications I've found to be too simple to the point of being useless.
Metro apps have to be purchased through the Microsoft Store. If nothing else this makes Metro a non-starter.

Configuration. While this has gotten better with 8.1 and some patches, configuration is now all over the place. Is it in the control panel, do you need to get to it through the charms bar, or the Metro configuration. Basically it went from being fairly easy to find and change the setting you want, to trying to figure out which interface should be used and flipping through multiple screen on that interface to finally find the one setting you need.

Ribbons, nuff said!

Application and games not working. The Sims Medieval, Diablo 2 are the two I know about. Now Diablo 2 is quite a old game, but The Sims Medieval came out after The Sims 3 and The Sims 3 works. Then there is WinDVD Pro 2011. Now I understand that for most people this works. For me it did not because I "upgraded" from Windows 7 and Windows 8 sometimes misses installing some key OS files. I think this case was scripting.dll, or something close to that. Only way to fix this problem would have been to reinstall the OS from scratch. I tried everything else. There were some other programs that I was able to get to work in Windows 8 with compatibility settings that weren't needed in Windows 7.

While file copying, less memory usage and less CPU usage was nice, the reasons listed above, plus some others I'm not remembering right now made me upgrade to Windows 7 when I got a new machine. Basically I was spending a lot of time babysitting an OS, where the OS is supposed to help me get work done.

Simple answer is YES. Everything will be monochrome soon.

Have you seen Microsoft's Visual Studio lately? It is mostly a monochrome mess. You get bits of colour here and there, but I'm sure the next version will "fix" this.

Heck, you can also look at Corel for this stupidity. I think it was Paint Shop Pro X6 which by default all the icons were monochrome. They patched it later to add colour icons and then patched it again to make the colour icons the default.

My grandmother was given a iPod. One of the ones with the "innovative" wheel. She never has learned how to use it. A year later my aunt gave her a Creative Zen. Though the Zen was something like 1/5th the size, my grandmother was able to use it no problem. Creative labs had the Jukebox and the Nomad before the iPod. The Nomad could play MP3s, FM radio and could record sound. Their products were easier to use, cheaper, more features and better built. They just didn't have the great marketing of Apple.

For phones you just have to look at Palm and Nokia. Both had touch phones with nice interfaces and more features before Apple. Actually Apple basically stole the Palm interface. Again, Apple had better marketing.

You look at the iPad. Many, many, many tablets came out before it. Though in this case it was the interface and marketing that made them come out on top.

What did Apple innovate on? Marketing. That or they think innovate means to take from other people, make it worse, but prettier.

Good evening, London.

Allow me first to apologize for this interruption. I do, like many of you, appreciate the comforts of every day routine- the security of the familiar, the tranquility of repetition. I enjoy them as much as any bloke. But in the spirit of commemoration, whereby those important events of the past, usually associated with someone's death or the end of some aweful bloody struggle, a celebration of a nice holiday, I thought we could mark this November the 5th, a day that is sadly no longer remembered, by taking some time out of our daily lives to sit down and have a little chat.

There are of course those who do not want us to speak. I suspect even now, orders are being shouted into telephones, and men with guns will soon be on their way. Why? Because while the truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power. Words offer the means to meaning, and for those who will listen, the enunciation of truth. And the truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn't there?

Cruelty and injustice, intolerance and oppression. And where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission. How did this happen? Who's to blame? Well certainly there are those more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable, but again truth be told, if you're looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror.

I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn't be? War, terror, disease. There were a myriad of problems which conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense. Fear got the best of you, and in your panic you turned to the now high chancellor, Adam Sutler. He promised you order, he promised you peace, and all he demanded in return was your silent, obedient consent.

Last night I sought to end that silence. Last night I destroyed the Old Bailey, to remind this country of what it has forgotten. More than four hundred years ago a great citizen wished to embed the fifth of November forever in our memory. His hope was to remind the world that fairness, justice, and freedom are more than words, they are perspectives.

So if you've seen nothing, if the crimes of this government remain unknown to you, then I would suggest you allow the fifth of November to pass unmarked. But if you see what I see, if you feel as I feel, and if you would seek as I seek, then I ask you to stand beside me one year from tonight, outside the gates of Parliament, and together we shall give them a fifth of November that shall never, ever be forgot.

One of the reasons the videos look fake is because the lighting is static. Light is never 100% static. Most people's eyes pick up on this and know that there is something wrong, but can't explain why. They just know it is fake because something looks wrong.

The other problem is that the movement is too linear. Even with a steady cam and rails, you still get small irregularities in movement and shaking. The video was perfectly going from point A to point B with out any flaws at all.

It is these, and probably other flaws I'm missing that tells us these computer generated scenes are not real, even though they are scans of actual places.

What I found funny was in Lord of the Rings there was this one fly through a valley. I though it was bad CGI, turns out, even though there was some CGI in the shot, it was the real model elements that looked fake. Going back frame by frame I realize the problem was that too much of the model was in focus and a lack of depth by dust particles was making it look fake.

My 2012 Surface Pro "Cold Boots" in 2 seconds. Flash Drive. My 2010 netbook boots in 20 seconds. 5400rpm hard drive. A lot of the boot process is dependent on the hard drive, so a low end 2015, should probably boot as fast as a higher end 2012 machine. I put "Cold Boots" in parenthesis because Windows 8.1 almost never really cold boots. It uses a form of hibernate where it figures out what is exactly the same each boot time and stores an image of that on the hard drive, then just loads it into memory. That combined with UEFI makes Windows 8.1 boot really fast on new hardware, even if it is low end.

One of the things Microsoft did right with Windows 8.x is reduce the memory it uses. So much so that it only actually needs up to 360mb of memory to run the OS while in desktop mode. That is up to, that is not at least. In this case the OS will definitely NOT be getting in your way. Actually, I've found Windows 8.1 is better to use on low end hardware as they have also reduced CPU use and optimized the start-up time.

2GB is enough for basic Windows use with running multiple programs. Of course depending on what programs you are using. I have a netbook that isn't officially supported by Windows 8. It went from 80 seconds start time in Windows 7 to 20 seconds in Windows 8. Programs launch and respond better now with the Windows 8. While there are many, many things wrong with Windows 8, it works extremely well on low end hardware.

Don't get me wrong, I hate Windows 8.1. Metro sucks, they messed up the configuration by having it spread all over the place. They broke multiple programs. On my last main machine it slowed down my boot time from 60 seconds to 90 seconds, though some of those problems were because I upgraded instead of fresh installed. The upgrade process is broken, it will upgrade you, but may forget to install critical OS files and will offer no way for you to fix it without reinstalling. Windows 8.1 feels like Windows Vista. They messed up the little things, which is what they got right in Windows 7 and is really important in your day to day usage. On my new main computer, old one the SATA controller failed, I upgraded to Windows 7, but my netbook, I wouldn't want to go back to Windows 7 on.

Mjolnir isn't just any screwdriver! It's a sonic screwdriver of kick-ass! The hammer part it just sonically created. ;o)

They have very strict rules for "giving" money.

First off, Gates only contributes as much money to the foundation as can be written off.

He "generously" gives to school districts. In exchange the school must only use Microsoft products. We will pay for the computers and initial licenses, but then you get locked into an agreement to pay Microsoft Licensing Fees, which means the Gates Melinda Foundation will pay %40 of the cost, and the schools have to pick up the back end 60% in a few years time. Gates still has substantial shares in Microsoft.

Some places they have built water treatment plants to treat the water that has been polluted by the factory built up the river. In quite a few of the cases, the factory built up the river was made by a company with investment money from the Gates Melinda Foundation.

They have also developed Common Core, to teach English and Math in the way that Bill Gates thinks it should be taught. Adopted in 46 states so far partially due to the $76 million to help adopt their philosophy. Common Core mandates that a far greater percentage of classroom time be spent on “fact-based” learning. Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point instead of Shakespeare. Freakonomics instead of Poe. Bill and Melinda Gates truly believe that population control is key to the future through artificial contraception, sterilization, and abortion initiatives. Regardless if you agree with this or not, the "charity" is making sure with its money, this is what your children are being taught.