[goes to look] I'm not seeing any complete, working drives at that kind of price. Those start at around $300. :(

Otherwise.... tell me more, and what to look for in such a drive used?

Last I heard, BluRay-R discs have a shelf life of about 6 months before they start losing data. Has this problem been solved??

This is why I archive my email into separate bins every 60mb or so (which means about twice a year) -- anything larger becomes unwieldy. It's a nuisance, but not nearly the nuisance of trying to search the file with an external tool because it got munged and won't open in the mail client.

[This is with SeaMonkey, which still keeps mail as plaintext, thank ghod, so any good text editor can root about in the file at need.]

Their server doesn't support resuming?? or is it specific to their client software, if any??

Regardless, that sucks. :(

The problem with the whole backup tape thing is that the total solution tends to exceed the cost of just buying more hard disks, and is often so much slower. :( And in 20 years, will you still have an interface that can handle the hardware??

Dunno about now, but back in the days of QIC-80, the only tapes that were worth a shit were Sony. Number of bad blocks when first formatted (don't forget to format your tapes!) and likelihood that the tape would be bad later on correlated pretty well, in my experience. Sony consistently had no more than four bad blocks per tape (the only one I ever saw with more, I returned as defective), vs 20 to 300 for other brands.

And all I could find for my Travan drive were TDK, tho they seemed to be okay.

Great, now I've got kids on my lawn again...

Right, because who needs to pass a law requiring a gun registry when we can just ask the NSA for a list on demand?

Oh, wait, maybe this is a BAD thing.

You gun nutjobs would probably be a lot more successful at making your case if you could string together at least 140 characters that make sense. Right now, people like you are actively keeping the phrase "gun nutjob" alive, and you're turning off people like me who actually support your position. I know it's asking a lot of someone with a room temperature IQ, but could you at least try to think before you click "post"?

A "hostile takeover" merely means that non-owners (the management) are opposed to the owners (shareholders) choosing to sell.

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Even the adherents of the basic principles themselves seem to stop short of explaining why they work. "Here, this is duplicate code. You should follow the DRY principle and get rid of it." "Why?" "Because it's a principle."

They should let the new kid do some sink-or-swim maintenance on code that doesn't follow the principles. You want to learn about DRY, try changing one branch of duplicated code without realizing there was a cut-and-paste copy elsewhere in the code base. Now you've gone from a solid bug to an intermittent bug, and your clients are still yelling at you. Thus beginneth the lesson.

They're certainly not "worth nothing." They're worth whatever a vulture capitalist is willing to fund, or whatever an IPO will bring in. Those people still have the ability to turn punching purple monkeys into a pile of quick cash. The few technologists who time their insider stock-option trades correctly will get rich, but almost everyone else will get pink slips and a hard slap of reality.

Everybody out there imagines they'll be the one who lucks into a lucrative stock market trade, just as every gold miner imagines he'll be the one to strike the motherlode. I wish them all luck, but that's all I'll give them. I'm still not dropping $0.99 on a fart app.

If someone offers you a pile of money for your home, and you decide to sell it, it's wild ideological nonsense to say they're taking your home by force.

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As someone pointed out in a previous story, the real problem is that the Constitution has no teeth. :(

I say you are wrong, but this guy said it better.

- yes, today more people realize that it is better to be free than "the ruled". As an anarcho-capitalist / libertarian / objectivist I welcome the use of technology to let people to get from under the oppression of these rulers.

I come at this from a completely different viewpoint, having only recently dipped my toes into Linux - for me, a package manager is a relatively new concept. The nearest I've come to it previously has been with Apple's App Store, both for iOS and now OSX - plenty of choice, sometimes too much choice.

As far as manually installing apps goes, it usually boils down to double-clicking on the DMG file to mount it, then either running the installation package or dragging the app file to your Applications folder.

In theory, uninstalling apps is as simple as dragging the app file to the Trash. I say 'in theory' because apps do leave behind some detritus formed by using them - thankfully not to the same degree as Windows, but it is there. For suites of apps like Microsoft Office or Adobe Creative Cloud, there tends to be a lot more extra stuff deposited onto your system besides the apps themselves.

Sadly, updates do tend to be on a per-app basis, with the exception of those acquired through the App Store, which handles the update process.