I had only hard of LTO tapes quite recently, and I did a very tiny bit of poking around. The latest generation is LTO-6, whose tapes can hold 2.5TB each (uncompressed). The tapes themselves are quite modestly priced -- an LTO-4 tape cartridge (800GB uncompressed) costs about $30 each.

The drives, however, are not cheap. New drives appear to start at around $1200. Used drives are all over the place -- I've seen some on eBay with an opening bid as low as $350. Also, all LTO drives appear to have either an LVD SCSI or a SAS interface, which means you'll also need a controller card. There appears to be no such thing as a SATA LTO drive.

Plus you get to re-live all the joys of selecting tape vendors, and placing bets on whose tapes are going to last for 20 years.

Peter Bright has been sucking the MS cock since he first started posting on Ars Technica's forum back in the late 90s. His posts were always full of vemon and hate towards anyone who dared criticize MS (and therefore extension, himself) When AT was making new positions for editors, he whined and screamed for one, and if he didn't get it, threatened to leave AT. I am so glad AT implemented the "ignore" function. Now him, and Evil_Merlin are never seen by me. If only I could filter out his stories as well...

Alien asteroid mining.

'nuff said.

Mmmm, nope. I'm still seeing ludicrously sluggish behavior on some pages (some of Jira's pages, and on some of Freescale's discussion fora).

Browser: Chrome 33.0.1750.146
OS: Linux Mint 15 ("Olivia"), kernel 3.8.x
GPU: Intel i965
OpenGL Version: 3.0 Mesa 9.1.7

Mind you, if I only turn on HW acceleration in the advanced settings panel, GMail runs sluggishly. If I also then enable your software rendering override, then GMail appears to run normally, but in both cases I still get the sluggish Jira pages. I've no idea what Jira's doing that would run so slowly.

Here ya go: http://www.electronicplus.com/

It's a family-owned and -operated business, with a single retail presence in San Rafael, CA. I used to have a part-time job there when I was in high school. That was (*gah!*) 30 years ago. They're still in business.

There was a Radio Shack in town, too, but you only went there for the pre-fab project kits and the free battery. (And the TRS-80 computers, if you were in to those.)

Electronics Plus's prices are nothing to write home about. But their selection is Z0MG!!1! Where did they find all this stuff?!? The only places you'll find an equally astonishing variety of things is HSC and Weird Stuff Warehouse (and maybe Fry's).

Gratuitous plug for my YouTube "Let's Play" playlist.

All the videos I've compiled and uploaded to YouTube have been made using Kdenlive. I don't labor under the notion that it's perfect, but I found it much better and more accessible that anything else I tried.

Kdenlive's most annoying bug at the moment is that the sound in the final compiled video will sometimes drift, i.e. in an hour-long video, the sound will start off in sync with the video but, by the time you get to the end, it's as much as 1.5 seconds off. This drift does not appear when playing back in the editor timeline; only in the final compiled video. I have not been able to reliably reproduce this issue for the developers, nor do I have a notion of what triggers it. Once it appears in a project, it's there and you can't get rid of it. It's possible it's an issue with MLT (the library on which Kdenlive is built) but, again, I haven't isolated the issue.

Other than that, it's worked very well for me. Even on those occasions when it has crashed, it has never destroyed my work; just re-launch and pick up from where you left off.

If something better came along, I would jump to it without much thought. But I haven't found it yet. I'll give 'pitivi' another look, but it looks as if installing it into my generic Debian system will be a pain (v0.92 is only available in the 'experimental' repository).

I was the CEO of a company that sold ringtones and MP3s a la carte for mobile devices. When you added up (1) the licenses paid to record labels, (2) the fees paid to mobile operators for payment processing, and (3) publishing royalties, it was something like 120% of the retail price for the content. So, umm, not a really scalable business model.

I find this fascinating, especially given that the prices charged for ringtones were pure usury. I wonder if you'd be willing to relate a more detailed story of what you were facing.

Security? On a Windows platform?

You must be new here.

That NBC has broadcast (ahem) their intentions loud and clear. It is now up to you (the person wishing to watch the Olympics) do decide what you are going to do about it.
When your choices are systematically taken away, yours options become much easier to make.

As I wrote here: http://slashdot.org/comments.p... I used Seagates exclusively, because they never failed on me, and every time a client came in with a bad hard drive, it was either a WD or Hitachi. It's also worth mentioning that Seagate were the *only* ones for a while to offer a 5 year warranty on their drives. If they sucked so badly, why stand behind them for so long? In short, your experience and mine agree, and I used a *lot* of Seagate drives...

I'd like to know who you deal with then... IBM lied about their DeskStars WD lied about their (ancient, admittedly) 6.4 MB drives that had near 100% failure rates Maxtor lied about their 100 gig drives Hitachi bought out the DeskStars and initially, made no changes whatsoever, causing the trend to continue. So I ask you, who is left to buy from?

15 years ago, nobody "needed" broadband. Dialup was, "good enough."

Today, try doing anything other than text-only email over 56Kb dialup.

Broadband uptake enabled a new class of Internet sites and services. Google is betting that history will repeat itself by kicking speeds up by two orders of magnitude. It also has the beneficial side-effect of lighting a fire under AT&T's slothful ass.

Also keep in mind that GFiber offerings are symmetric. That means you get to upload your photos and videos at 1Gb/sec as well, and not through the 768Kb straw that DSL and cable providers decided was "good enough" for consumer-class Internet.

Or as I mentioned in my last line, YMMV, I've had *great* luck with Seagates, from 1999 until I changed careers 11 years later, and I had large numbers of people come in with failing drives (typically WD and Hitachi DeathStars) that I replaced with Seagates and no one ever complained. Seagate were at one time the only company with a 5 year warranty on their drives. Says something about their product to stand behind it for that long.

For the past 11 years, I used nothing but Seagate drives in my builds for clients. Over those past 11 years, I built something like 20 systems a month (on average) with occasional large scale orders of 200. The number of failed Seagates I could count *on one hand* YMMV clearly, but I stand behind Seagates.

I couldn't tell you why, but I haven't (yet) observed the described behavior on my XP system. The auto-updater ususally settles down in a matter of minutes.

No. In my case, it's trying to apply the .NET updates that completely murders my system. Apparently MS wants a gigabyte or so of free disk space on C:\ (and nowhere else) or the update will fail miserably. As it happens, my system partition has about 200MB free space, so the update disappears down a rabbit hole and never completes.

I used to think it was because it needed a bunch of temporary disk space, so last night I changed the TMP and TEMP environment variables to point to a volume with tons of free space, rebooted (because, you know, it's Windows), set just one of the several .NET updates running, then went off to see The Hobbit. When I returned some three hours later, the update had hung, the disk was idle, C:\ had zero bytes free, and the system log was corrupted.

Honestly, I don't know why anyone continues to be surprised by Redmond's rank incompetence...

Schwab