umm, you mean, like, maybe the user uploading the content to Facebook in the first place? Oh, right, there's no consent (implied or otherwise) there at all. Nope.

Your guess assumes that Facebook engineers are as stupid as you and think that the problem can't be solved.

Who says they want to reuse them?

This medium is for archive storage. The whole point of archive is that it's static data, not liable to change - and you don't even want it to change. Also, if your goal is to keep the data forever then you're not going to reuse the media it's stored on, whether that's tape, HDD or optical.

There is a difference between 'enterprise' and 'consumer' drives.
Facebook, Google, et al. may use consumer grade disks, but mostly because they've engineered for failure - they *expect* drives to fail and have built systems around that expectation (multiple copies in geographically-diverse locations, software automation of data replication, etc.).
When you have that level of back-end systems managing failure, it doesn't matter so much if your disk fails in 2 years or 5 - your system is engineered to deal with it so you might as well save money buying the cheaper drives - they're all going to fail anyway.
The same is not true for 'typical' enterprises where 'replication' may extend as far as RAID within a host, with an offsite backup.

I've heard that's common for broads everywhere [da boom CHING!]

In other news, shares in Sharp Electronics and LG Electronics jumped sharply today, for unspecified reasons.

That 'article' is a joke - of course Surface comes out on top - when 'reviewed' by the guy who wrote the book on Windows Phone 8.

It's also funny - I recall the exact same argument over quantity vs. quality of applications back in the 80's when Apple were the underdog. Seems like MS can't change their habit of... recycling other peoples' ideas.

I also especially like the sign-off... "It’s time for all of you, my faithful readers, to tell me why I’m wrong"... well, we might if there was ANY option to comment on the page.

So, why are Slashdot running this Surface ad under the guise of an article?

But that's just familiarity. If you grew up under a metric system, were taught metric in school and saw metric measurements in everyday objects (other than the 2 liter soda bottles...) then you'd be able to visualize 1 kilometer just as easily as you could visualize 1 mile today.
The issue here is that it will take a generation (or more) to make that transition, during which time all the big nobs will feel increasingly isolated as they're more quickly overtaken by these 'new math' thinkers. Inertia is comforting.

but the _commercials_

When paying/working/whatever on a computer you're generally focussed and have a general control over what you see/do.

On TV, especially kids TV, any program you're watching is frequently interrupted by images and messages about junk food, snacks, sodas, sugar-laden juice drinks, etc.

I contend that it is this (subliminal" maybe) messaging that's leading to obesity as much, if nor more so, than just the sedentary nature of watching TV.

Change the computer so that every for 2 out of every 8 minutes of usage your computer screen is replaced with images of BigMacs, Whoppers, Coke, Skittles, etc., etc. and I BET that all those non-fat computer kids will get fat pretty quickly.

Damn, did I just give the junk food industry a new target to aim for?

All the 'throttle the process/port/ip' answers are wrong. I'm surprised people here can't see that.

The issue is that the idio^H^H^H^H user in question is using AFP/SMB/whatever to open the file, but that's the same process he would use to transfer the file over the network.

If you throttle the file server daemon to 10kbps/nice 20/whatever, all that will serve is to make network transfers excruciatingly slow to the point where he'll be complaining "but it takes _hours_ to copy the file over the network, which is why I work on it remotely".

If there is a throttling solution it is in allowing fast file copies while maintaining slow open/writes. I don't know that exists (at least at the user-manageable level). Read-only shares might help (that way he can't save his edits back) but will end up with fragmented file stores (and someone has to keep track of where the latest version of any file is).

You might be able to craft a possible solution via Mac OS X's ACLs - maybe write/add_file on the directory, but read-only files so he can create new files but not edit/save/overwrite existing files.

At the end of the day, though, without a network infrastructure change (e.g. a central file server) this problem isn't going to go away.

1) Since announcing the closeout, Onno Tijdgat, the author of the Mac irc client ircle, has confirmed he's in discussions with Talk City about making a mac-based client. He has publically stated that ads are NOT part of the discussions of making his irc client 'supported'.

So all the people who claim this is all over ad banners can stick that up their butts.

2) Talk City's network is not like the other major irc networks (DALnet, efnet, etc.) which are distributed across multiple, geographically diverse servers. All Talk City's servers are centrally located. This significantly changes the flooding issues that irc is (in)famous for. There is no significant delay between servers (assuming things are running well ;). This means that clones are a somewhat bigger problem since other networks would have an inherent delay because of their network design. There is no foolproof, effective way of dealing with flooders and clones in this kind of environment. If anyone knows one, I'd like to know (sell it to Talk City ;).

3) Dorao, the channel you were in may have had 35, but that's one channel out of thousands. Talk City limits most rooms to 50 users max so it couldn't have got a lot bigger, anyway. Also, Talk City runs two separate networks so if you connect to chat.talkcity.com you're only seeing half the picture.
Most days, Talk City runs well over 20K concurrent users. Not a DALnet or efnet record, but not too shabby, either.
In either case, comparing them to these networks is not relevant... Talk City isn't irc, they'd prefer the term community... encompassing chat, discussion boards, home pages, etc. They do have more users and higher usage patterns that other similar sites, by which you'd have to consider Yahoo chat, Excite Chat, Geocities and the like (Sammeh, I seem to recall seeing a notice when they surpassed 3.5 million members).

4) 'raw' irc users make up a small minority of all chat users in Talk City. WebTV, EZTalk (java) and their co-branded Pirch client are used by the majority of users. Talk City is obviously betting/expecting some PC users will switch to EZTalk or TCPirch, and the Mac users will switch to EZTalk or ircle if Onno comes through. Sure, they'll gonna see a hit in numbers, but it's not going to be as big as some people expect.
The hosts who've posted here are clearly working in Talk City's '#Computer' forum where you would expect a higher proportion of computer-savvy users using irc clients.
Even if this were about ads (see point 1 above) the increase in users who switch to add seeing clients isn't going to be that high. I assume Talk City's done its homework on the numbers and thinks it can live with it.

5) Whoever it was who said it's all about scripts is wrong. TCPirch has the ability to run regular pirch scripts (at least, I think it has) and I would expect ircle to be able to do the same. It is true, though, that the majority of disruptions to chat are caused by one or other mIRC or Pirch script that some lameass installed. It's blocking these clients that Talk City is aiming at (and I can hear IRCops on other networks wishing the same). As I understand it, TCPirch has other controls to block war scripts while still allowing the majority of scripts to run.

In short, sure, hard core chatters that want to be able to run their war scripts can do so elsewhere. Talk City's clearly making a business decision based on protecting their core users from the lamers. I don't have a problem with any chat (irc or otherwise) where I don't have to deal with jerks on a regular basis.

Now I'm done. I've already used up my quota of brain cells for today.