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It doesn't matter if they can't make a profit on something or other. They're the common carrier. They can make profit in other places and for that matter in a lot of cases they're accepting money in the form of tax rebates and subsidies that are supposed to support the un- or less-profitable...

jtr, you can get 20 miles outside Chicago's city limits and find areas that don't have good internet access, let alone the unpaved roads and farmhouses of middle America. We let these companies get away with murder in the hopes that they'll deliver on their promises and that is exactly the...

Here's an interesting graph showing which TV channels people would pick if given an a la carte subscription option. The major US broadcast networks are all at the top of the list, but Discovery is ahead of four of them. Supposedly mandatory ESPN is only a requirement for 30% of those surveyed...

That's actually really good news.

Those also factor in to my decision not to advocate in this case.

With regard to tape, I don't think it makes much sense unless you're at the point where your backup volume would require multiple hard disk drives under any circumstance. An LTO drive will cost probably $1000. Tapes are cheap and each one will hold 800GB or 1.5 or 2.5TB apiece, but you have to...

Looks like some of the big OEMs are releasing refreshed Z97/X99 motherboards now that there's a minor update to the USB spec (for 3.1, not C). I'm pleasantly surprised by that.

Dedup is in the Windows Server feature set, just like tiered storage and parity/double parity stripe sets. You can do those things cheaply and easily with FreeNAS if you really want them.

At least they're letting you use SQL Express. Whatever they're doing can't be THAT serious.

There are tricks you can do to remember passwords. I'm fond of using short pass phrases that are based on quotations from some particular media (e.g. poems of Robert Louis Stevenson or lines from the movie Clerks) that I associate with that customer as a seed for what I use. I might use the...

In a typical data breach, you'd find out that internal safeguards don't exist or weren't actually being followed. Personally Identifying Information stored in an unencrypted format would be stolen and, since this is the USA, the only reason anyone would be notified of the issue is if the data...

The Linux kernel code does indeed have a long list of misbehaving drives. The article mentions Samsung models as bad actors and IIRC Crucial drives are known to behave poorly on Linux. Not to be that guy, but we really can't have any idea what other OSes are doing for this stuff because we just...

They don't provide terrible service. They had a security leak. They disclosed it and communicated the extent of user exposure. That's substantially more than a lot of companies are willing to do. As it happens, exposure it this case is pretty limited unless the guys who got the data are...

The write performance on Seagate archive drives is horrific. They write just fine in bursts, up to maybe 10 minutes at a sustained high speed. But in single drive or RAID operation, with or without an SSD serving as a cache drive, they slow down or stop writing entirely for periods of up to a...

Has there been some change in the status of RAID support with SSDs that I haven't heard about? Every time I've tried to RAID1 SSDs, even with SLC drives, they've died inside of a year.

I really liked the first two Fallout games. The third game got the tone dead wrong by dropping the humor for ever-greater darkity grimdark and was critically short on different models and textures for what was supposed to be an open world/sandbox RPG, but it was one of the last mainstream games...

Lastpass uses salted hash lookups based on your master password to store everything. If you change your master password, it changes the salt value and the software has to rehash all your passwords. Even if someone got everything they store, they still can't see anything unless they want to sit...

I know Doom 3 was terrible because it was heavily pre-scripted and didn't have all the cool action or ability to both see and shoot, but this looks like a wild over-correction. Maybe they're just emphasizing the mayhem above and beyond the atmosphere, but original Doom was terrifying and kept...

On a somewhat related note, I just bought a couple UAP-LR access points that supposedly have a range of 600 feet. These are for an unrelated project, but I was kind of curious if they would work, especially over that kind of distance and I need to buy access points anyway.

I'll try it and let you know. I'm willing to bet that it'll be fine.

I suppose I should have said "Telecasts." I believe it's at least possible to get a 1080p signal from at least some cable or satellite boxes from all the major networks except Fox.

Youtube and Netflix have 4k streaming and there's 4k porn because of course there is, but AFAIK there's no TV-based standard for delivering a 4k stream, nor any boxes that support decoding it. I don't even think Fox broadcasts in 1080p yet.

Historically, Microsoft has allowed users to roll back an upgraded installation of Windows, but as long as you have the product key for your old version you should be able to wait and use the upgrade media on a new disk drive if you'd like.

There's an Amazon Reseller called Computer Upgrade King that typically offers SSD-equipped Thinkpads at competitive prices instead of nutso-bonkers Lenovo retail. The laptops are new and carry their manufacturer warranty. I haven't had any problem extending that warranty after purchase. I've...

There's a game called Tabletop Simulator that looks super cool other than the obvious drawback that you can all probably guess. The super-amazing thing about it is support for 7-person multiplayer and a pretty decent selection of implemented games including Android:Netrunner, Mage Knight, Cards...

Here's what I think is the primary source for ridiculous screenshots. They probably have a lot of guidance for modding. Technically you can do the same thing with Fallout 3 I guess. I don't think it gets pretty, but it looks like you can make it less baby poop yellow. I do wonder if modders...

This method does in fact work on a Verizon GS5 that hasn't taken the Android 5 upgrade. I tested it on a co-worker's 4.2.2 GS5 just now. Some models are a little different, but Odin is Samsung's tool for screwing with boot loaders and ROMs and the only real trick is getting in to CWM Recovery in...

The nice thing about most of the rooting tools is that they either work or they don't do anything. You're not trying to install a ROM, so it's unlikely that you're going to brick your phone. I'm toying with the idea of installing CM12 on my phone since it doesn't appear that it's going to get an...

I suspect that your old key will still work as long as you're reinstalling on the hardware where it has already been activated. I have observed this to be the case for 7 to 8 upgrades that have been rolled back.

There are posts on Imgur pretty much every day that are full of ridiculous screenshots and descriptions like "This is my sorry-ass old PC running these 182 Skyrim Mods. And it's an A4 with a GTX550 and 2GB RAM!" And then someone else will come along a half hour later with "And here's what it's...

You won't be getting a usable .ISO from the "reservation" download. There's probably a .WIM file or something that could be use to build an ISO, but it's highly probable that Microsoft will make the ISO file available for people who need them through normal techie channels. Since Windows 7 ISOs...

I use a tool called Drives to visualize space utilization in combination with ES File Explorer to actually handle file management. I also have a 128GB card in my phone and it's basically full, but that's because my response to having any amount of free disk space is to fill it with something...

The preview 100% has a time bomb in it. Doesn't your laptop have an embedded OEM key like the last one did? Good to see you again sed. How is Kentucky?

I have 1Gbps at the datacenter and I can say that there's really not a practical difference for normal home user activity between 100Mbit and 1Gbit. Youtube still won't load instantly and you still get occasional jaggies on Netflix for reasons that have nothing to do with the speed of your pipe...

I saw this on Slashdot and thought it was interesting: Phoronix Compares Socket 478 Netburst devices to modern Intel and ARM CPUs.. I've been telling people for a while that the CPU in my cell phone is probably faster than their XP-era Pentium 4 and it turns out that it's almost certainly true...

Blame consoles. Gamepads require terrible, terrible UIs. Also, just as a point of clarification, are you talking about Skyrim as it was launched or Skyrim with the crap ton of mods and updated texture packs that everyone who still plays Skyrim has?

The official path for a clean install of 8.1 for machines with an 8 COA or firmware embedded key was: install with an un-activatable known key for system imaging, then enter your Windows 8 key after the install was completed. That's really not THAT bad, except that I have no earthly idea how...

Most of my UPSes are also hand-me-downs for client sites. I'm sure I have a couple that are over 10 years old.

Allway Sync looks like the UI was developed in about 1994, but a pretty good option for keeping files synchronized if rsync would be overkill.

If it has big-boy desktop CPU and a dozen or so hard drives (like the "spare" old rigs many of us would have), 400W isn't out of the question.

I generally prefer Tripp-Lite because they're local to Chicago but if I wander around around a datacenter for any length of time, power protection will be overwhelmingly trusted to APS devices and I've probably installed dozens of its 1500VA units. My crappy experience with the boat anchor in my...

As I understand it, it's derived from total power-on hours across a small fleet of sample units, which is probably done in modeling rather than physical units. And we all know how meaningful MBTF numbers are for individual hard drives, right?

No updates happen on lab machines at all. I can't do Domain memberships either because I'm supporting a multiboot Windows configuration and the machine account passwords on domain accounts get changed every 42 days whether they sign in or not. My systems get restored from a master image. I use a...

"Supported Lifetime" means the duration of time for which Microsoft offers support for that combination of Windows version + its underlying hardware. Something that is bothering me more than a little is that my lab PCs have Windows Updates turned completely off as a group policy setting. I...

I don't think I noticed it before, but something new that is being deployed with Windows Server 2016 is direct support for Docker Images. I've only done a little bit with them, mostly to spin up SugarCRM (which uses an ancient version of PHP), but the option to spin up...

It's coming in Q4 2015. It's probably worth waiting since it'll have actual architectural changes and tech improvements that will matter for the long term, like DDR4 support and a whole new chipset nomenclature.

Broadwell-DT parts. Usual story: Improvements in power efficiency due to die shrink and modest per-clock performance improvement. Yawn. These guys add a potential L4 cache and apparently offer slightly-better-than-AMD integrated graphics, which I have to say is something I would not have guessed...

My file server started a complete virus scan yesterday of all attached drives. I think it might finish by Thursday.

My only client machines had the Preview installed fresh rather than upgraded, but all my lab machines have the notification.

I'd get a Brother HL2280. Anything with an XP driver would work in 2000, but in the worst case you might have to open up a downloaded .exe in 7zip or something to dig out the files you need.