MetricMike

LMS - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_management_system

Blackboard is an LMS that many major universities use to provide online support for classes. At my university (University of Richmond), I can sign on to blackboard.richmond.edu and for each of my classes that semester, can download assignments/lecture/slides that my teacher has uploaded, upload assignments for my teacher to grade, view a roster of the other kids in my class, participate on a bulletin-board for "class discussions", view my grades, and my teacher can send out emails to the entire class fairly easily (enter text in a box, select which students of that class to send to, hit submit).

It's okay, but there are definitely some issues. Like, not being very user-friendly (I constantly help out my instructors with how to use it). Also it doesn't work very well in Chrome =/

To use Google's DNS servers you have to put their IP addresses manually into your network settings (http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/docs/using.html). If you don't set these, or set them back to using the "default" you'll use your ISP's local DNS servers instead.

Collaboration with Mono on .NET would be the "killer" news for me. With Java looking increasingly shaky, it'd be nice to have a second "write-once, run-everywhere" paradigm.

While this may not end up being the greatest of reasons, a lot of my classmates shy away from .NET languages/MSFT technologies because they're more difficult to develop in Linux. Getting rid of that complaint would be super awesome.

Searching for "cell phone public" brought me to this:

http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/business/a/cell_directory.h...

Cell phone numbers have been going public this month for the last 6 years. =(

For example, I really enjoy the solutions that Valve/Steam and Blizzard/Battle.net came up with. I give them a CD Key and they give me unlimited opportunity to download and install the game that key goes to. Steam even goes one step further and ensures that it's updated.

More importantly, neither of them require online interaction - you can set Steam to an "Offline Mode" in case I want to go an airplane or my Internet connection isn't doing so well. On top of that, I regularly max out my downloading speed when moving games around on Steam. In Steam's case it's much more convenient than pirating (don't have to check for quality, no cracks to apply) and adds even more value (checks for updates automatically) to the game. On the flipside, it's exceptionally difficult to bundle up games shared from Steam - but the gifting codes are just as easy as buying the original game. Blizzard hasn't yet made it too difficult to bundle, share, and upload a downloaded game (other than multiplayer not working due to CD-Key issues), but I find a lot of my value in the multiplayer component.

That kind of direction, where DRM adds value to the game rather than adding layers of complexity, is the direction I wish DRM would go in.

To your first point: Can you link to anything that would back this up besides anecdotes? I'm unconvinced that "I am surrounded by pirates" is more authoritative than the NPD's report.

To your second point: As devinj pointed out, there are a number of private servers that enable playing MMOs without connecting to the servers, albeit with a scale of a few hundred players. A few of them even tweak experience or drop settings for a "more entertaining" experience. In addition, Blizzard was well-known, successful, and loved before World of Warcraft so I'm inclined to lean more towards the notion that there success is because of quality design rather than MMO/DRM implementation.

I'm taking a networking class in my CS program and one of the (at least, I think) interesting topics we covered was the distance issue when linking two nodes together on a network. We got around to talking about really big networks (like the Internet) or a hypothetical Earth+Moon Future Internet. Another student and I had our dreams of low-grav YouTube broken when the teacher showed us the more gritty parts of how two nodes talk on a network, namely the round trip delay. This article sounded really neat and made me remember that NASA usually comes up with some very interesting workarounds/solutions.

(This is my first contribution to HN after about a year of lurking so I thought I'd make my post a bit more meaningful and explain why I thought this was neat.)

Thanks! I've been trolling the Wikipedia pages for both of them but that's easily the best summary I've come across so far. =)

The article states SATA 3.0 should have a maximum throughput of 6 Gbits/second. But isn't that the same expected throughput of USB 3.0? What advantage would I have in using SATA 3.0 (Revised?) over USB 3.0?