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In a substantial minority of US states, publicly indicating that you support peer-reviewed scientific research will cost you an election, as will being in favor of low cost health care, strong regulation for industry and human rights for homosexuals and Muslims. That said, there just aren't...

The Samsung Note II is as far as I know the only smartphone with a genuine two-days-of-normal-use battery. But I have no idea what that translates to in terms of your needs. I've heard tales of Blackberry devices with very good battery life but as I understand it BB's GPS/navigation options...

Personally I'm looking forward to autonomous vehicle navigation so that the amount of driving I actually do will be minimal.

Zikk allows people to do some remote administration of Android devices. It's kind of limited - you can make it install free apps from the Play Store or set up ring tones or add wireless passwords, but that can still be a big help for the helpless.

Driving on legitimately urban streets is a decided edge case that only impacts a small subset of the drivers at any given time, but you're suggesting a globally applicable punishment because there are a few places where there are too goddamned many stupid people, whether they're on foot, on...

Disabling the technology that enables phones to communicate inside a vehicle could also potentially disrupt other telecomm services the phone might be using, such as traffic information systems. Also, that's a pretty severe restriction to place on passengers. I don't like people who drive and...

So Microsoft's online games authorization service for Windows is shutting down next year. That's a big deal because: 1. It's run by one of the biggest and best-funded companies on the planet. 2. It hoses software that was purchased in a retail box, not just titles delivered online. 3. It also...

Actually, I think it's the well done character animations and setting. It's more charming than challenging, much like Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja.

Sagethumbs is a handy-dandy Windows add-on that enables previews in Windows Explorer for a wider array of file types than the stock picture viewing tool. In particular, it can make thumbnails of .PDF and .EPS files. It's also agnostic of your underlying default viewer, which means that you can...

There's also no appreciable price difference between the 430 and the 630, at least not for cards with the same amount of RAM.

GT630s are about $65 and have respectable specs and purportedly good Linux drives. And also fans that will fail at the drop of a hat, but you already know that.

I've been playing a lot of Rougelike games lately. Spelunky is a lot of fun. It has kind of bad console-portitis in that the Windows version only works with Xbox 360 controllers for gamepad input and the game only supports a half-dozen fixed-size screen resolutions, but each games is typically...

Avast no longer runs acceptably on single-core systems. Spybot 2 chokes and kills low-end Core 2 and C2D Celeron CPUs. For Spybot, the main value is in the Immunizations, and the Immunization definitions are the same for 1.6 as they are for 2.0, but it's tough to tell people that they have to...

I do not have a problem adding a mapped path to my Plex Server. I have paths on Windows and on FreeNAS. Is it possible you're running the Server as a User that doesn't have that mapped drive in its profile (i.e. running the server as the Admin account instead of a regular username)? At any rate...

I've had that happen when a manufacturer is out of something. The first time I ordered a set of Cards Against Humanity, most recently.

Axe Cop is awesome. There's a webcomic and a irregularly-published-by-Dark Horse comic book as well. I've mentioned my appreciation before and so did Handy. :)

I think CPU spec might be a silly criteria for purchasing a laptop at this point. There's really very little difference between a modest C2D and an i7. The issue here is how the device will be used, but assuming adequate RAM and a fast storage device, they aren't that far apart for the vast...

They're doing Return of the King next year.

I got to do something amazing last night. The Chicago Symphony, Symphony Chorus and Children's Chorus performed the complete score to "The Two Towers" at the Ravinia festival. I never thought I'd see a live performance of it. It was - and this is not hyperbole - breathtaking.

People building monsters might want to look at this. I'd like the source article but it's in Japanese.

Not yet. I only have one non-virtual Linux machine now and it's a small form factor machine.

It's kind of a stupid configuration, but I was also able to create a SnapRAID set with 12 3TB drives configured as three 9TB RAID5 arrays and 18TB of multiply-redundant storage. Basically, SnapRAID allows for fully asynchronous levels of data redundancy. I can set aside couple drives in RAID1...

Corrupt archive?

dd, did you ever establish the precise set of hardware that allows your TV to operate in 4k mode?

Handruin has bigger things to deal with right now, man. Thank you for organizing this Clocker.

The compelling argument for BB wasn't/isn't the keyboard, it's the ease of deployment and management. BB service is the same the world over because those phones all communicate through Blackberry's data network. Admins can turn on encryption or remote wipe or configure new users for the devices...

The compelling argument for BB wasn't/isn't the keyboard, it's the ease of deployment and management. BB service is the same the world over because those phones all communicate through Blackberry's data network. Admins can turn on encryption or remote wipe or configure new users for the devices...

Death Watch Update: Blackberry's CEO said today that they're investigating a sale or strategic partnership. Now I'm trying to figure out what the value to Blackberry is or who would want it. I could see Microsoft buying it just because it integrates so well into Exchange and can be managed so...

One nice thing about having a managed virtual environment is that you can often migrate the load on to one of the other systems in a fairly transparent fashion. Maybe that means being oversubscribed on RAM for a while or having to throttle CPU cycles per machine, but that's probably better than...

Coug is talking about setting up some pretty massive systems for his datacenter. Given his employer's size and financial health, I suspect that it makes more sense to cram as much hardware as possible in a single physical machine as possible so that the cost of software licensing is minimized...

Quick update: Yes, you can include RAID1 mirror sets in SnapRAID snapshots. I used a couple 32GB SSDs and a Windows SoftRAID, made a parity snapshot, pulled both disks and restored the data to a 64GB thumb drive.

Based on my experience with FreeNAS, that extra RAM is probably what made more of a difference than anything. There's a huge jump if you can get to 8GB as well.

SnapRAID also has a Linux flavor. I suspect it could be made to run on top of Openfiler if for some reason you felt like doing that (perhaps to mix LVM/RAIDz arrays and single disks?) I still have my FreeNAS system, but I've got it replicating the content of shared directories on a Windows file...

To be fair, I'd been awake for 20 hours while I wrote that.

... on the other hand, Slashdot's moderation system is awesome for both efficiency and accuracy. At any given time, around 10% of active users, people who log in and post at least occasionally, are gifted with moderation points, usually 15 at a time. Those users are deputized as moderators. They...

Hark! A post! About storage! Since I retired some of my oldest 3TB drives today, I have a pile of them to play with. So I've started playing with Storage Virtualization products: SnapRAID and FlexRAID. I tested them on a Windows 2008R2 machine running on an i7/920 with 16GB RAM. I have a total...

A few years back I went through a lot of hassle finding a cheap add-in eSATA controller that wasn't a SiL piece of shit. Eventually I came across an appropriate Syba card with a Marvell chipset that worked perfectly for my application. Perhaps what we can take away from this is that Marvell...

That's how I read the licensing info. Also each Windows Server license can be used for two virtual server instances, so you'd only have to buy five copies of Server 2012. You still have to pay for User/Device CALs though, and that's the murderous part. You'll probably want to verify this with...

There's an extremely compelling argument in favor of Server 2012 R2 Datacenter, which is that even at its higher price, all hosted Windows Server VMs running on that hypervisor included in the datacenter edition license. If you need to run Windows Server guests, you're still coming out ahead on...

I don't have much video on my mobile devices because Plex. What I do have is basically .MP4s I get from Youtube or Vimeo and those play without any hassle at all.

That is indeed a terrible thing and you have my sympathies.

Joe VLC

I use WinAmp, Beyondpod and Doubletwist for audio and VLC for video, plus Plex. I have different players to maintain my place in different playlists.

Netflix hasn't had skin flicks since about two weeks before its IPO back in 2002. It used to have Cinemax-type Andy Sedaris movies and Playboy videos. The porn comes in much, MUCH faster. If you lived in the same building with a bunch of people who believe that the residents of central Indiana...

My 8 discs at a time Netflix subscription had an average data transfer rate of 1.12Mbps over the last six weeks.

New memory tech is always interesting but after years and years of watching it seems that very little ever makes it to market. NAND does definitely need a successor and I suspect that billions of dollars will go in to developing it. Maybe we'll get holographic storage in the next couple years...

There's a really good reason to use Windows backup with Exchange, which is that many backup tools aren't Exchange-aware unless you buy some goofy add-on module and standard backup apps don't clean up Exchange's logs or properly snapshot its database. If you're using something like Reflect or...

Metamorphose is a pretty sweet and user friendly file rename tool. Space Sniffer is a handy update to my old friend SpaceMonger.

CHRIST YES