You seem to have totally misunderstood how the authenticators work. They are decidedly NOT USB dongles.

An authenticator is a changing key generator, which shows you a one time key when you hit a display button. You then type this key in after entering your username and password to log onto the game. This is very similar to the RSA SecurID token my work requires I use to log onto a our VPN.

Basically the keyfob contains a psuedo random number generator which generates a new key every few seconds. The authenticating server knows the original seed, and can figure out the currently "valid" number shown on the key. Since each code is only valid for about 30 seconds, this makes is significantly harder to hack the account.

In fact this system is more secure than any system my bank uses, as very few banks in the US even give you the option of using a system like this.

Probably because someone at Microsoft or Intel decided multihead was an important feature and worked around the hardware bug on Windows. (Intel would have to or people might realize Intel graphics chips suck compared to integrated NVIDIA or AMD, and Microsoft might 'cause people would probably blame Windows for Intel's graphics failure).

My guess is that on the Linux side someone coded the driver to some spec and no one bothered to actually implement a usable work around. Just 'cause Intel's driver is open source doesn't mean that it's always going to be better. (Maybe they have fixed this now, but I'm not that familiar with 945 chipset Linux support.)

The problem for me isn't that they have ETF fees, in fact given most phones have a subsidy I under stand that. My problem is that you cannot sign a contract without an ETF even if you provide your own phone. On top of that if you buy a phone without a subsidy it's not like you can negotiate a service discount with Verizon. You pay the same amount in either case and that's not really fair.

If Verizon actually cared about the customer they would offer a choice of the following two plan options.

1. Subsidized phone, contract, and ETF. You pay for you phone over the life of your contract, basically you're leasing the phone.

2. Unsubsidized phone, no contract, no ETF, discounted plan rate. You buy the phone outright since you paid full price for it you should save the difference between the price you paid and the subsidized price over the same length of time as the contract from option 1.

In fact at one point I was going to sign up for a plan with Verizon and bring my own phone, but even if I didn't get a new phone from them to setup new service I had to agree to a 1 year contract which included an ETF. There was NO way to avoid the contract.

This entire subsidy and ETF thing on your phone reminds me of old MA Bell. Before the original AT&T got broken up due to being a monopoly it wasn't actually possible for you to buy a telephone. You HAD to lease the phone from the phone company, and the phone company owned your phone. You basically got whatever phone Ma Bell wanted you to have. Cellphone companies are in that position now. While they say you "buy" your phone, you're really leasing it with no option to truly own it. If these companies were forced to offer a choice of phones, and didn't have these crazy contracts to hide behind I'm sure the cost of cellphone handsets would drop along through real competition.

I believe drivers actually have some optimizing compilers built in for the various intermediate shader languages which get run and spit out actual GPU bytecode. To make the driver useful they'd have to open source their compiler as well and maybe they have some great optimization techniques that AMD or Intel might rip off if they could. It's not like Intel's open source their C/C++ compiler on Linux. How is this any different?

At least NVIDIA's not hindering the Nouveau project.

Which is why this isn't currently targeted at the gaming market (though there is some startup doing "streaming" games, I forget their name but you can play crysis!). The target here is for tasks which used to be sent off to render farms for a day or two and would return a half dozen high resolution pictures. Previously the architect had to anticipate all the possible views/angles that their clients wanted to see.

Now you can get the same high quality ray-traced graphics in almost real time which allows the architect to change the view, lighting, etc based on the clients feedback. Heck you could even just give a pointer to your client and let them play around with in their "virtual" building without requiring them sit at your office.

The other option is to go buy a bunch of NVIDIA quadroplex boards and setup your own render machine, but now you're tied to showing everything off to people in person, on your one machine.

I assume it's "in the cloud" for the same reason people outsource other tasks. The architect doesn't need to invest in the hardware/software platform and a render farm. Instead they contract the work out and don't need to worry about the technical details. This is not much different than what many people do today only instead of getting some static images back they get an interactive utility.

I think it's more that there's no competitive advantage in releasing the drivers. You're absolutely right in saying that AMD's closed source firegl drivers are terrible on Linux, so were Intel's closed source drivers when they still had them. AMD/Intel don't invest much in their closed source driver and it shows. For them releasing their specs and letting the community do all the hard lifting is a big win.

NVIDIA's driver support on the other hand is much, much better. Stuff actually tends to "just work" out of the box compared to the competition. For them releasing their "good" driver open source would only help their competition develop a better driver.

Having a driver with excellent OpenGL support on Linux is one thing which helps drive most Linux workstation sales to NVIDIA. The Engineers which need to run apps like Autocad and don't even bother with Intel even though their driver is open source. All they care about is that support for the apps they need is rock solid. Given the cost of those workstation class cards I'm sure NVIDIA's focus is on that market and the consumer Linux market is probably secondary.

Opening up their driver just so someone who's running a 10 year old graphics card which they don't sell anymore doesn't make good business sense. AMD would probably still have closed drivers as well if they didn't have anything to lose. Also is there even support available for AMD's new 58xx series in Linux? I don't think they've publicly released the specs for their latest and greatest chips yet.

I agree that's the fundamental philosophy behind unschooling but except in a few cases most students won't be able to see the big picture. It's very easy when pursuing ones passion to be come TOO focused and miss the big picture and that's where I think a parent can really "drive" their child's education. But I don't mean that the parents sit down and say you're taking this boring algebra class you don't see a point to because you'll need it later.

From my example the theater majors I knew really just wanted to spend all their time just working on acting skills. To help them do that their parents setup a theater group so their students had an outlet for doing plays. But many of the students only wanted to focus on the acting part because they had to manage a their own theater they got exposed to other aspects of the field. They learn many more useful skills that they would have missed if they had just acted in a few plays, and they enjoyed doing it since the other subjects came up as part of doing what they love to do.

Even if you have a true love of learning it always helps to have a mentor who can give you some guidance.

Often parents team up to help cover subjects they don't know much about. Perhaps you're not a math expert but you might have an english degree and know a lot about composition. You could teach your and your friend's children english lit, while another parent maybe with a degree in Mathematics of Physics could teach a science class.

Almost everyone I knew when I was homeschooling did something like this. In fact you can end up with teachers who know a lot more about the subject than the "real" teacher in the local public school. I'd rather take my math class from my parents friend with a PhD in Mathematics, than that person with an Education degree who might lack any "real" math background. (Not that there aren't good Math teachers in public schools, but it's hit and miss.)

I was homeschooled during highschool and I'm familiar with the whole "unschooling" movement. Traditional homeschooling tends to revolve around having a curriculum that mirrors what's taught in public school, but taught in a 1-1 or small group environment by parents. Some of the benefits of homeschooling vs just learning in the regular classroom is that you can usually move at a pace which fits the student (often faster), and avoid disruptions from people who have no interest in learning.

Unschooling was/is a movement within the larger homeschool movement. It's not a new idea and I remember people first talking about it 10+ years ago. The difference in unschooling vs homeschooling is that instead of having classes in particular subjects like math, english, biology, social studies, physics etc. the student directs the studies and these subjects get incorporated into things which interest the student. This can be a very successful way to learn since everything you learn is related in some way to your interests.

For example if you really wanted to design computer games your english/writing work could be incorporated into doing a design doc/writing a story/dialog for your game. Your math/science work would be incorporated into the project as well since you'll probably want to know physics/chemistry so you can make your game realistic, and you'll probably need math all over the place to design various game systems. The big trick with unschooling is that you and/or your parents have to see how to incorporate your interests into everything you're learning.

On unschooling story I remember was someone who wanted to breed championship race horses so they learned a ton of biology, enough math to manage a farm, and spent lots of time hanging out with their horses. Personally the few people I knew who did unschooling where really into theater and so focused their studies around acting, and skills which would help them get a career in theater. So rather than have someone take an math class with just "boring" numbers they'd have to learn about the costs of putting on a theater production, balance books, selling tickets, figuring out dimensions to build sets, and other theater related math areas. Sure these people didn't do calculus, but then again most people don't do calc in highschool (not needed unless your into science). Basically, the unschooling philosophy was let you kid do what they want and drive them toward learning what their passionate about. This is very similar to the environment one encounters in graduate school while doing Masters or PhD research. But not everyone can succeed in such a free learning environment.

The challenge with unschooling is that it only really works with a special sort of person who's HIGHLY motivated. These people are the types who tend to succeed wherever they are. If they weren't unschooled they'd probably be doing this stuff in their spare time (possibly flunky some classes they found "boring"). For every person I met who was really unschooling and learning real skills which would help them out, there was someone else who was unschooled because that sounded better than "staying home and playing video games". I always felt when I met an unschooler/homeschooler who's parents didn't push them or weren't encouraging learning did a big disservice to their kid. But I also met many people who learned a lot outside the regular school system and turned out to be productive members of society. The people who don't push and help their students thrive and claim they are unschooling by having their kids play video games all day just give a bad name to all the people who really benefit from such an open learning environment.

I hope you're joking since the TCP/IP and UDP protocols have the concept of "host order" and network order. All packets should be translated to network order before sending them over the network.

Plus both systems run PowerPC based chips which run big endian so even if they didn't bother doing the host to network order translation you that won't be the cause of your networking failure.

As many people point out RAID isn't backup which is something I've taken to heart. But what I haven't been able to find is a good solution to do cross platform backup.

I have three machines which I'd like to utilize in a backup scheme. One machine is a linux box with a large SW RAID5 setup I'd like to back up to. The other two machines are my clients one is running WIndows, the other Mac OSX.

Are there any cross platform backup solutions which will allow me to back up files to the Linux machine from my Windows or OS X machines? I've considered using rsync with the directories which I want to backup, but that will hose files if something gets corrupted on the client box. I'm pretty sure rsync will happily sync my backups to the corrupted file. Plus I don't really have any history as rsync will keep the two directories up to date, but won't generate snapshots. (Well not directly).

I could just occasionally tar/bzip up all my files, but I don't really want to have to manage gigabytes of tar files. Especially as it would be nice to be able to easily recover a particular version of a file without hunting through tons of archive files. Plus tar.bz2'ed files don't really support accessing a single document in the file.

I've also considered just putting all my files in source control with svn, git, or perforce (free for 2 users) then mirror the repo but that doesn't seem to be the best solution either. I'm not sure what the overhead of the various source control systems but at least a few of them support binary diff, and they have versioning built in. But I would like to avoid having to check out, and check in files on the client. This solution also doesn't lend itself to making backups very automatic.

So is anyone aware of a cross platform backup solution (Windows/Linux/OS X)? Which would allow me to mirror/store the backup files on any of the systems that doesn't have the overhead of making a TAR file per day?

Optimally I'd like a solution where I can configure specific directories to get backed up, and have backups occur as some sort of timed cron job. I also would like a way to browse/recover past files without having to mess with manually extracting files from an archive. An open source solution would be nice so that I don't have to worry about losing access to my data in the future, but I have no problem paying for such a backup program.

That's annoying. I guess it looks like it's mostly just newer stuff up on there so far, and even not all their shipping products are supported.

I'll have the keep that in mind next time I go laptop shopping.

The 9400 and 9300 are pretty much the same but I think the 9300 has 16 shader cores, and the 9400 has 32. I'm not sure if that affects HD decode much. It does make a decent amount of difference for gaming, and CUDA apps I think.

You didn't just write the above did you? You show your ignorance. A long time ago they did just compositing, but that was back in the VGA controller days.

Then they evolved to do fixed function rasterization, but those days are over (unless you're Intel doing integrated stuff).

GPUs are MUCH more programmable, and getting more so with each generation. You can do pretty much any floating point math function you want now. Go look up CUDA, and OpenCL they let you basically write C code for the GPU.

Sure the GPUs might not do so well when it comes to brancing, but you'll see that GPU's are being used to do more than just rasterization. Sure razterization would be an important target for NVIDIA/ATI but that doesn't mean it can only draw triangles.

If you look at the paper I linked (which you obviously didn't) it describes how they wrote a ray tracer using NVIDIA CUDA and EXISTING GPUs. If stuff gets more programmable as NVIDIA seems to be targeting, then it will only get easier to write ray tracers which run on the GPU.

If you want proof GPUs do more than rasterization go check out how NVIDIA's GPU tech is now in the Tsubame super computer.

Even Intel is getting into the GPU business with Larrabee, I bet they plan to write a ray tracer for that.