Good Grief.

I live in Rhode Island, and I assure you that we can keep things dry that need to be kept dry.

You can't exactly compare keeping an entire region "dry" to keeping a single fortified establishment dry. It's a bunk argument.

If it's imperative to keep something dry, you raise it, you build drains and pumps into the structure, and you don't put it in a flood plane.

They do have such things as ships with sensitive electronic devices, and submarines.. Those seem to be able to stay dry.

Do you actually think there's a company building these things without considering rain fall?

You're sitting on your own pile of crap, my friend.

If I copy your Adobe CS4 DVD, *you still have it.* I didn't *steal* anything from you, or Adobe. What I did was infringe their copyright.

This is a LOT different than theft. Theft denies you of what I steal from you. Copying your DVD obviously isn't theft. Now, there's a thought process that if I use this software without paying for it, I've stolen profits from the vendor, Adobe in this example. This argument is ambiguous at best. There's no guarantee that I would have paid for this software if I couldn't get it for free. In fact, I'd venture to say that MOST people that use unpaid software would never pay for said software.

Still not legal to use software you didn't pay for (if it's non-free software) but it's not theft.

So clean the crap off yourself and re-join reality.

I bet you're a school teacher, that will punish the entire class if one kid throws the eraser.

And your example is stupid, because something like Subscription compares 1:1 to a massive functionality change? This comparison would be more akin to "You must now load OtherOS only from the Game OS. Other OS will no longer be able to be launched automatically." Instead, it's "You can no longer have a subscription to demos and such. In fact, you can now no longer download demos at all. No more video, no more demos, no more downloading."

Do you really think that the sales of PS3 units for these purposes even makes a little tiny dent compared to the total number of PS3's sold?

I mean, does NASA have a secret stash of 600,000 of these things or something?

It was for ME. I can't say how big of a percentage I belong to here, but for me, it was the tipping point. I don't own many game systems. I have an Atari 2600 and an SNES. I read about the PS3 - standard USB ports, standard memory card slots, support for Bluetooth Keyboards and mice, uPNP media player that can play XviD, Blu-Ray.. it was all very nice but then "Able to install Linux without hacks, and can switch back and forth between Linux and Game OS." Awesome!

Of course, it turns out that they totally nerfed the Linux support by not allowing access to the GPU. It's not as if I wanted to run 3D games - I just wanted a damned decent double-buffered V-Sync video display. But it's still a cool thing and I do use it on occasion.

So basically, I won't install any more updates, and that means I won't use their store to buy any more of the TV shows or games they have available on there. Oh well for them.

The most disappointing aspect of all of this is that I've really enjoyed my PS3 a lot and I've been a pretty good advocate for it, but this sort of thing - and the fact that their patch to fuck us ended up breaking a bunch of systems - just ruins the whole thing.

Leave it to Sony to fuck up a perfectly good deal.

I would hope that the reason they went with a battery is because the load can be transitioned in milliseconds, not seconds. Any power outage greater than 1/10th second is basically the same as a 10 minute outage. The idea is to keep everything running, including electronic systems and computers.

Most large data centers use the same technology. They have a first tier battery system, and a second tier generator. The first tier will kick in and prevent any interruption in service, and stay running until the much slower diesel generators kick in and get up to speed.

We just experienced this at the office last week. Unfortunately, the second time the power went out, the secondary battery units failed and POOF the entire data center went down and none of the stores could process credit cards.

I'm confident the technology exists to keep something dry, in 2010.

Not *all* the phones. My N900 supports SDL.

Look man, if this random girl can't understand the services industry without reducing everything to "whoring" then she's a fucking moron.

So - a waitress is a Food Whore since she delivers food for money?
A delivery man is a package whore?
A gas station attendant is a gasoline whore?

Stupid.

Certainly, but your hard drives just sit around in one spot and never move. If tapes are properly cared for, they do last a long time, and you have to rotate them out of service if they're used a lot.

Tapes often get a raw deal. People snatch them from a drive, they sit them on top of the server, they don't put them back in their cases and they have no shielded storage location. They get full of dust, they never get retentioned...

But I'd like to see how long your hard drives last on a normal backup cycle of being transported back and forth between off and on site.

People always talk of the raw cost of the disk or tape. While a tape library system is not cheap, a storage array system is even more expensive. You can have a full cabinet sized tape library system with several drives for much less than a Clariion, Symm or EVA of similar capacity.

Many large enterprises use several tiers of storage, even just for the backup system. Where I am now, they have high end Tier 1 storage, lower-end Clariion FC Tier 2, Clariion SATA Tier 3, and for backups they use TSM Disk arrays (T1), VTL system (T2) and a massive tape library (T3 and Off-Site.)

The technologies aren't exclusive. They can compliment each other.

I don't use much paper. Most people in IT don't use paper much. You might print out a big diagram to hang on the wall for everyone to look at but almost everything is in electronic form.

Except for the meeting room. In my current position I'm the one that hosts most meetings I attend. I need to bring hand-outs for people, and I need to take notes. While I could use a laptop to take notes - and sometimes I do - it's not the most practical tool and I feel as though it can interfere with the flow of a discussion.

So that's it - meetings. You need notebooks and handouts.

Companies can greatly reduce the number of hand-outs at meetings if they include projectors in every room, however. At my last contract, 100% of the conference rooms had projectors. You could set up your computer and walk through a powerpoint or just a word document for everyone to see and no paper needed. You could even take notes right on the big screen and people can participate in that part too. You still needed hand-outs sometimes but quite a bit less often. (And, I ran Ubuntu on my notebook so it was fun when everyone gawked at Desktop Cube and Wobbly Windows.)

I've taken apart all sorts of servers in the past (HP being the most finger friendly.. Dell the least - sharp metal!) and am able to disassemble the entire machine, replace the mainboard, put everything back together (they can get really crammed in there, unlike this wide-open desktop case) and had the machine back up and running in no time.

Not even trying to be fast, and I can do it much faster than this guy.

Just saying that any dumbass can put together a computer quickly (always could.)

Actually, it is what you said. You said that it was your understanding that if the address is not listed on the card, they would require extra steps.

That's an incorrect understanding. I simply responded that I don't have my various shipping addresses listed on my cards, and I've never had a problem from NewEgg.

I did say that perhaps I've never been "audited" by NewEgg. They probably randomly verify non-billing shipping addresses. But they've never looked up my shipping addresses because my card companies know nothing about them and NewEgg has shipped to wherever without a question.

While I also order most things from NewEgg now (mostly because they ship FAST and you get your stuff in a couple of days even from the California warehouses (I live in RI) and their prices are usually very resonable) I still use PriceWatch to check prices and sometimes order things.

Pricewatch had a HUGE problem a few years back with vendors selling things at low prices but then charging huge shipping on the back end. It ruined Pricewatch because you couldn't tell which vendors were actually cheaper.

Now, Pricewatch requires all vendors that list there to include shipping costs, and if you try to charge something other than what is advertised on Pricewatch they will pull all of your items.

The sucky part about ordering everything via Pricewatch vendors is that you end up ordering from 5 different vendors and it can take a long time to get all your stuff.