Even if a person scanning the pages is paid 100$ an hour for his work, that person can probably scan 2 pages a minute, at a cost of about 0.8$ per page. JSTOR charges 10$+ per article, which may be one or several pages, and you basically get a token that expires in 14 days. You don't even get permanent access to that article.

I'm sure nobody says they shouldn't try to recover their costs and cover the bandwidth and server costs but it probably costs less than 3$ to host a PDF file for 20-50 years. Charging tens of dollars for every access seems really greedy and wrong, especially since they didn't create the work, they didn't pay for it, they just host it and scanned it...

This Wired article is very long but very informative and it's worth the time to read it:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html

http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-701277.pdf

Formatted Capacity 500,107 MB = 488 GB so you need 138 MB/s to get data in an hour.

It's about 132 MB/s actually - remember, it's multiples of 1000, not 1024 and then some space is used by the file system.

Anyway, it's not clear what they want just from the description here on Slashdot. Read the labels of the drive? But seriously, one could get a 2 TB drive or whatever drive has the most density these days and make it show up as 500GB drive... I believe it's called http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/short-stroking-hdd,2157.html

If they were to release HL2 - episode 3, it would have been released after Portal 2 anyway. I believe Portal 2 contains some references that will get the worlds of Portal and Half-Life 2 closer together - Portal 1 already had references about Black Mesa.

Also, from a marketing point of view, if you want to release a game, you want to release it just like big Hollywood movies are released - either when children come back from Summer holidays or towards the end of November - early December, when parents start buying Christmas gifts.

So I wouldn't be surprised to hear Half-Life 2 - Episode 3 is already done or in some beta stage and just waits for the right time to start advertising it.

Smart move from Valve imho would be to get around December both Episode 3 * and * some kind of updated Orange Box, containing the whole Half-Life 2 episodes and both Portals. It would be an excellent gift.

Server video cards embedded on motherboard don't use the system ram, they have an embedded 8 to 128 MB memory chip. Sure, they have a tiny frame buffer in the system ram but there are other things using more system memory than that frame buffer.

As for power usage, such plain vga video card embedded on the motherboard uses a couple of watts on idle - the chip doesn't even need a heatsink so it's not really a power saving feature if you remove it.

You would be saving much more power by using a power supply with high efficiency and wattage close to the actual server usage, instead of using (optionally redundant) 500-800 watts server power supplies.

Seriously, complaining about a few watts... some 1U servers have at least 4 x 40 mm high speed fans inside, each using 2-5 watts of power (because they run at max speed all the time) and you're complaining about a couple of watts on a video card.

Your system doesn't really use 750 watts. Depending on the configuration it barely uses 80-150 watts on idle and when browsing the Internet and only when you play games or do some heavy stuff like video encoding, it gets close to 300 watts.

People got accustomed to power supplies with big watts number because in the past manufacturers were actually lying about how much their power supplies can "deliver" but nowadays there is very little difference in the price of components for a power supply, between let's say a 400 watts power supply and a 750 watts power supply, so it's not worth it for manufacturers to make "quality" power supplies at low wattage.

If you remove the dedicated video card and use a motherboard with integrated video with not so many overclocking features (like 8+2 vrm chips for the cpu, which cause power loss), change the processor to a dual core close to what regular laptops use and enable the power saving features, you'll get close to an average of less than 100 watts. Won't get close to the power efficiency of a laptop because the power supply is designed to get peak efficiency at about 50% of it's rated power, not at 100 watts.

Surely, it will work because it's impossible for someone to encode stuff in Base64 or even Base36 and just paste in the email about 4-8K of characters at a time.
Or maybe it's too hard to just create a 1x1 pixel PNG file in paint, run copy smallpicture.png+secretdocument.doc fakepicture.png in command line, and use this picture inline in the email...

This. Lots of page accesses = lots of processing power spent on encryption and decryption. Not everyone can afford hardware cards to do the encryption.

Second, proper certificates costs money, and you "kind of" need one static IP for each website - it's a big hard for a person to justify the need for one IP for each of his 10 blogs - most companies will only issue a block of 8 IPs (5 usable) to a single server.

And of course, I hurried to post the message above and I forgot to mention this other presentation they made about Sexual diversity in games and how sexuality can influence the story and gameplay : http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/extra-credits/2520-Sexual-Diversity