Rent some decent off-site storage at an established data centre and get a leased data line.

Don't bother messing about with tapes, it will be a full time job maintaining the library and space will be an issue after a while - I presume this is why you think it is impractical. With a proper data centre, you shouldn't have to worry about drives failing or the storage medium degrading due to age; most offer multiple site redundancy as well.

Seriously, don't get clever; save yourself the hassle and your business' reputation if something goes wrong with your 'lockbox' method.

When someone told him he'd have to forward half his code to the IRS as a result of synTAX, he just 'flew' off the handle.

Why the hell should I use my bandwidth AND pay for the privilage? I get capped at 2mbit for 4 hours if I download more than 1GB during peak time.

It is refreshing to see alternative business models being marketed to the movive/music industry, but these schemes really need to involve the ISP if they are to suceed, especially since as internet usuage increases, availible bandwidth decreases - and they aren't going to upgrade the networks any time soon.

Oh yeah, and if I pay to download a duplicate that only costs the supplier a fraction of wholesale fibre-time, I better be able to keep the copy.

Well he certaintly won't now, that's for sure.

Three figure quantities of staff on average salary takes up a large percentage of that. Then you have equipment, motion capture, voice capture, software licenses, general overheads. It makes me wonder how any new companys get into the business... well... I guess they don't really unless they are holding hands with a large publisher.

From the business' perspective, IT is just another resource.

When times are good, you get free coffee.
When time are bad, you get your genitals squeezed.

Reading the article, the statements made apply to all employees, not just IT workers. If you hadn't already realised that the global financial situation was going to be used as an excuse to bust your balls, then welcome to 2007.

Clever use of analogies there, make out that "protecting artist's rights" is akin to preventing the abuse of children, but then yank the reins by saying it is wrong to censor content. What exactly are you trying to say? Or are you just babbling so people get used to the idea of having their online privary infringed upon.

Yes, it is, but let's forget about artist's 'rights', what about mine? As a so called 'humanitarian' I am quite suprised at his ignorant and narrow-minded comments.

Not to mention the fact he falls into the media-hyped trap that downloads = losses.

What a tool.

From the article (first paragraph), and the summary

... to the primary objective of getting the program working. Okay, okay, perhaps not... However, trying to construct coherent descriptions and code analysis during a 2am coffee-fuelled session usually results in the babble people complain about. I don't think I've ever opened up source code to see everything perfectly explained, and to be honest, it doesn't need to be.

To me, the most useful comments are usually the ones that give a brief explanation of the objective (of that section of code). Any developer worth his salt can figure out what has been hacked together to achieve said objective. Having text blocks littering the page is just useless unless the original developer was a world class author.

Good! Not every application needs to be perfectly optimised or debugged, and there are lots of situations where it is important to get something working quickly albeit not as elegantly as possible; LabVIEW and Matlab also facilitate this.

There's no reason to employ someone who is just going to reinvent the wheel every time they write an app; IDE's that simplify the most basic of operations are a godsend.

A Mac user cannot 'choose' Windows; it's either Mac + MacOS, or PC.

What incentive is there to develop IE for Mac? To tempt Mac users to Windows? Theres no reason to spend development time and resources developing software for an unobtainable customer base.

The same could be said about Apple by the way; there are software restrictions that disable installing MacOS on anything other than a Mac (without lots of tinkering and potential lawsuits), that's punishment for not buying a Mac I take it?

Hey, look at it this way, when we've eventually all switched to renewable energy, we can finally clear those pesky stockpiles of coal and oil.

EA uses a store/download app akin to iTunes and Steam.

It is called EA Download Manager, formerly known as EA Link, formerly known as EA Downloader

The activation key included with your BF2142 purchase has most likely been attached to your EA account. I would suggest downloading EA Download Manger and attempting to recover your log in details. Another benefit of this service is that you can also download any purchased games digitally, again, like iTunes and Steam. Good luck.

.... I think that sums up my thoughts quite nicely.

Erm, in my experience, the people least likely to remain objective in an emotional crisis is a female.

Another problem is that any measurement scale just isn't broad enough to correctly capture intelligence differences on a wide range of subjects. For example, my wife will spend hours watching reality TV and she 'hates' the news, yet, she will spend whole weekends engrossed in period drama, reading books, or researching history on the internet.

It all depends on how you measure intelligence, and, like TFA said, the IQ of both sexes is roughly equal, it's just that perhaps more men put it to noticable uses - for all I know, my hairdresser could be calculating the exact follical trajectory for a perfect styling or integrating my hair line to calculate the total (h)area.