Oh Quantum. I remember, over a decade ago, being given a couple dozen PCs that an organization was getting rid of. All of them had ~2GB Quantum hard drives and almost all of them were dead. I couldn't believe it. There may have been one working drive in the bunch. I guess that must have been a really bad batch. At least I got a bunch of nice neodymium magnets out of them. After that, I never considered buying a Quantum drive, though it wasn't long before they were bought by Maxtor (which I frequently used at the time). Eventually I did come across a working Quantum Bigfoot (~4GB). It was neat, so I held onto it. Of course, it's still not as impressive as those 5.25" double-tall monstrosities that take an hour to spin up and make the whole room shake.

Edit: I just noticed your Quantum has SMART support. I wonder how many Power On Hours it has?

Not sure if I'm reading it right but it looks like it is registering 69715 hours of power on which appears to be 7.9 years of active operation if these numbers are accurate and my math is right. :) I just remembered I had a 4.3GB Quantum in the router before this one and pulled the 7.6GB one out of another computer that was on and off sporadically for years so that sound probably fairly accurate. smartctl does indicate some pre-fail warnings now though that it did not when I last checked about a year ago so it looks like the drive may be nearing it's end of life before long. No worries though, nothing irreplaceable on the drive that a new drive dropped into the box and a fresh kickstart install and data restore wouldn't fix in a few hours time. :) The machine is far due for an upgrade anyway, it's running CentOS 5 right now and I've been meaning to put CentOS 6 on there for quite some time now and never got around to it, mainly because the netfilter IPv6 packet filter in CentOS 5 is stateless and that is rather archaic and pathetic in 2014. :)

I think when I roll out the new router setup with CentOS 6 it'll get a 20GB drive upgrade and put the Quantum on as a spare drive for unimportant throwaway stuff. :) That thing is getting ran until the bearings pop on it. :)

9 Power_On_Hours 0x0012 001 001 001 Old_age Always - 69715

Well, good for you. But realize that it's a crap-shoot, depending on the specific drive/media, operating and storage conditions, how much of the data you're trying to retrieve and a number of other factors, and different people are going to have different experiences. When someone says something like "reliable shelf life for data on a consumer SSD tends to be about one year, and for an enterprise SSD it's about 3 months. Even for a spinny-disk hard drive, 10 years is really pushing it" what is being said is that if you leave a hard drive on a shelf for 10 years you simply shouldn't expect all of that data to be reliably persisted (unless you have explicit specifications indicating such for that particular model). Maybe the data will be there, but there's a good chance at least some of it won't be -- that is what "not reliable" means. You can't really make a general statement about reliability just from your one experience.

Oh, my drive is most definitely messed up, though that's just another issue on top of everything -- the drive's head alignment is way off, BUT it's a very old drive that is also (apparently) designed to handle such misalignment quite well, so that old drive can read properly aligned data and read misaligned data (and when writing data it will follow whatever alignment was set during formatting). Due to the poor alignment from when the disks were formatted, the vast majority of the disks can not be read on a modern drive at all (not that any 5 1/4" drives are "modern"), but can be read by the old drive. So I found a "magic disk" in the bunch that had decent enough alignment that a newer drive could read it and used that as an intermediary -- use the old drive to copy data from "bad alignment" disks to the magic "good alignment" disk, then use a newer drive (in an x86 box) to read the "good alignment" disk and archive the data. Unfortunately even the old drive can't read all of the old disks (though the % readable 5 1/4" disks is better than what I have seen with 3 1/2" disks, even though all of my 3 1/2" disks are newer than the 5 1/4" ones). Using a new drive (with their ridiculous alignment pickiness!) does not seem to be a feasible option.

I found that revive program (via this page). Don't know that I could ever use it though, because like I said only the old drive can handle the odd alignment and the old drive is not an IBM PC compatible drive (it's a [url=http://www.cocopedia.com/wiki/index.php/FD-502_(26-3133)]Tandy FD-502[/url]), though it might be possible to jerry-rig a connector to hook the drive to an x86 box.

The reason is physics and typical use. Enterprise drives see a lot more data writes per unit time than consumer drives (consumer drives see mostly reads, and usually not even many of those compared to enterprise use cases). Writes wear out flash memory (eventually making an SSD unusable). If you used a consumer SSD for an enterprise application, the drive would become useless too fast due to the frequent writes. So for enterprise drives they modify how the writes are done, making them more "gentle" in order to make the flash memory last longer, but that "gentleness" also means that natural fluctuations in cell charge make individual flash cells impossible to read accurately much sooner. A difference of note between spinny-disk drives and SSDs is that SSDs (when powered up) actively seek out and fix bad "sectors" (blocks actually) whereas spinny-disks only fix bad sectors they happen to find during normal reads, not because the SSD makers are more concerned about your data than the spinny-disk makers (they're the same companies in some cases), but because SSDs lose data so fast. I.e., if you have an SSD in a computer that is commonly on, it can retain data much longer (potentially decades if you don't write to it too much) than if you just turned that computer off and leave it off.

EDIT: A word of warning about floppy disks: Just because you can read them without an error getting flagged does not mean the data is actually intact. The data integrity checks on floppy disks, while not entirely useless, are incredibly weak, and I have seen bad data slip by those checks many times. (I worked for a place where all of our programs had built-in CRC checks, and it was not very uncommon for programs transferred via floppy to load just fine -- and then fail the CRC check because the data on the floppy was actually corrupt. Normal programs don't do self-CRC checks and would just run with mysterious crashes and bugs introduced by that corruption.)

Maybe it is just me, But I think "GoGling" sounds much more appealing than GoGer. Especially now that GoG now has machinations to rule the entire Galaxy. Personally, I cant wait. Even if saying so uncomfortably reminds me of

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPcB3vWGO9k

So on topic, My 2cp, if you still want opinions. I would go with Shadowrun. Not much love for First person shooters, And there is something to be said about the cultural impact of being part of something during active development as opposed to a decade old FPS that came in right about the same time that shooters made their switch from a expanding on game play that plateaued and shifted gears to become the Large Pixel Colliders the genre has seemingly evolved into today.

Plus... who do you think is going to respect you more for your purchase in the morning? Harebrained Schemes Or Electronic Arts ?



Also... Has there ever been confirmation yet of what role Banished is playing in this years sale yet?

Last sale day freebie perhaps. If it's not a freebie then it sure is well worth its current discounted price. I'm sure going to buy it if I miss the possible giveaway.

EDIT: Needed to rephrase my statement. Language barriers.

???

How about not telling people false information about what they can and can't do with public domain works? Is it too much to ask you not to spread false information?

(Yes, I am aware that's probably too much to ask. Consider the question rhetorical.)

Clearly. Unfortunately, you are apparently also not aware of the copyright law in Greece (or anywhere else).

??? (I think something's being lost here in the Greek->English translation.)

Clearly anything that you've never heard of has never happened. Never! :-P

And have you never heard of "cable TV"? They charge money to receive their broadcasting, and they do on occasion broadcast public domain material. Profit!

And I'm not sure what to make of your "as is". You can't sell a public domain movie "as is", you have to burn it on a CD or DVD or transmit it over the air or down a wire or something -- it will take some transformation/work to get it to the paying customer in a useable form. (If you just mean without modifying the contents, then see above paragraph.)

With licensed material the success of such reselling might depend on the license -- some licenses require attribution, and if the consumer reads those they might think they've been "ripped off" if they paid for something that was available elsewhere "for free" (ignoring distribution costs). But stuff in the public domain doesn't require attribution. In fact, you could take a public domain movie, change the title screen to say whatever you want (so people can't just google it) and then sell that move "mostly as is". If you want to claim otherwise, show me the law that says you can't. (I'll accept US or Greece law, though for Greece law I will need google translate to be readable.)

Maybe if you think harder it will start to make sense to you. No? Try some more.

Still don't got it? Would it shock you to know that I actually paid for Linux? <<gasp>> Twice? <<GASP!>>

Plus, you do know that people (illegally) sell illegal copies of not-public-domain games/movies/etc. Why would they not do that for (legally) public domain ones (as long as they can find people willing to pay)?

Um, OK. (I'm just confused though -- if it's not your place to figure out whether or not public domain works can be sold for profit, why were you claiming they can't be? Shouldn't that claim have included some kind of giant warning if you're just saying stuff that you haven't bothered to actually figure out?)

Let me help you out though: You can. If it's public domain you can make and sell copies of it, modified or unmodified.

It's currently life+70 years in Greece.

Note that just because something is in the public domain doesn't mean it was created for public use. It may have been created for commercial use and only entered the public domain later (either because the copyright expired or because the rights holder had no more interest in holding onto those rights and had at least a little interest in seeing others do something with the work).

Also, note that even if a work was created explicitly to be "public domain" from day 1, that *still* doesn't mean it wasn't intended to be used by commercial enterprises. (Basically if you as an author want attribution, you need to go with a license such as MIT or BSD, but if you don't want attribution you can just skip any license at all and place the work straight into the public domain.) And try to remember that entrepreneurs are people too! (I.e., they are part of the "public" in "public domain".)

Think about what selling the work entails -- you need to find potential customers that are interested in this work. In other words, at the very least you are providing a sort of "match making" service, matching up people with works they are interested in. What's wrong with getting a bit of money for providing such a service?

And it's not "like you are the owner". I could go to Amazon right now and buy a thousand books that are 100% public domain works. Amazon isn't claiming to be the copyright owner of those works, they are just offering to ship me books in exchange for money. (Amazon is claiming to have the legal right to sell me such books, and they do have such a right, but that's not the same as claiming to own the copyright on the material.)

EDIT: I guess I could have saved a lot of time by just quoting here: "Public Domain games are literally in the public domain; any individual can do what they want with them, including selling them for profit."

Hard Drives and stuff aside old media if preserved right, can last a long time you just have to know what you're doing to make sure that they will last as long as possible. Also with floppies does any remember annoying head crashes? Those were the most annoying things ever.
Legal stuff right? well I don't want to say much other than gog's forms are not well debates on how long copyright lasts and things of that nature also if someone slips like that who cares? I don't if I really want to know I'll just look it up or just wait for something to pop up with copyright then look into the matter. I understand that the sale is getting extremely repetitive, but who really cares about a legal argument?

Also not trying to be rude, but legal debates are kind of annoying and a bit off topic of the sale

Anyone have any guesses as to what the final day of the sale will be like?

It's weird, on the one hand I'm sad the sale is over cause I've gotten great stuff I may not have tried before without it, but on the other hand I'm happy it's ending because maybe now my wallet will stop crying.

I want to say that it'll be like that day where they gave away magrunner, but I wish I had something to base that off of other than it would make sense. Also I think that there might be a re-run of the free games or atleast 4+ whatever hasn't gone at all like banished and omerta gold (but having omerta gold free too would make much sense either). 30 games on sale at the same time thing which hopefully cycles through everything one last time. So to prepare I guess I'm just going to get up at like 8:00 just so I don't miss a free game and to see what the sale changes into.

Dragonfall is mostly a new campaign. It adds extra stuff, but I doubt you would die without them. However, I am going to let you decide on your own by presenting a short list of what Dragonfall adds:

-A more flexible main story arc - choose which runs to complete first, and which factions to complete objectives for.
-More depth to the NPC runner characters.
-New weapons, outfits, portraits, music, and enemies, including more magical creatures.
-Improved physical adept gameplay along with additions for some of the other existing archetypes.
-A European city with a very different look, vibe, and cast of characters.
-A story that highlights the compelling themes of the Germany sourcebook.

Cool. I hadn't heard of spinny-disks doing that before. (I think I've seen the feature built into higher end disk controllers before, but not the drives themselves.)

But I wonder how common it is. (What drive are you using?) If I look at, for example, the WD Black which is a higher end consumer drive (and my newest box which I'm still not actually using yet has some of those in it), I don't see anything about an automatic scan feature. I do see something called "Corruption Protection Technology" but there they only talk about protecting against power failures, not bit rot. I tried putting "'wd black' 'bit rot'" into google and I don't like what I'm seeing. :(

I leave my computer running 24/7, so an automatic scan would be great. Currently when I do backups I always do full backups (rather than incremental) which forces all of my important data to be read, so at least at that point the hard drive will notice if something's not right (and if it were not auto-fixable by the drive the backup process would get an error, alerting me that something's up). But an automatic scan every 24 hours or something would be better than that (as I don't backup that frequently). Anyways, I think it's funny that the process of backing up my data may be significantly decreasing the chance that I will actually need to ever use those backups.

Medal of Honor is like... a sanitized version of Saving Private Ryan. It's got good production values for the time, but the intensity isn't there, the story and characters are presented in dull and uninteresting ways, and seeing head shots and such without even a drop of blood looks downright silly. They took WWII, and an intense movie set in WWII, and somehow managed to neuter them both to make this game.

It's not a horrifically bad game series per se (though the series does start to drag on a couple of games in), but it's not a FPS you'll have any desire to come back to once you beat it... if you even feel the need to do that much.

who told you that I care about licensed products that became "public domain works" ?
i don't even know the term "public domain works"

but I know about licensed and registered products
and I know the copyright-ing regarding them....

that was what I ve been asked for to clarify at first place (to someone)....because he thought his action of visiting an abandonware site, which distributed for FREE illegal stuff (because some people claimed that Abandonware stands for illegal) as he thought ( licensed as we know them under copyright protection), he thought he was commiting a crime!!!!

now the deal is (for you)....if someone wants to use other peoples' works to sell it for profit, i dont give a f*** for one....and two, consult a lawyer, i am neither qualified not arsed to provide that kind of information....
who would ask for this kind of information in a forum anyways, and/or which stuck-up moron will sit down to provide info on a topic like that, instead of forwarding someone to a lawyer qualified on the issue?!?!? (that's rhetorical)

Thanks for the responses and while I agree with many of them I chose MoH for two main reasons:
1.I don't have many Single Player FPS games except for Unreal Tournament:GOTY here and Half-Life 2 on Steam, I have been looking for a WW2 fps for awhile and thus MoH has been in my wishlist almost since it arrived on GoG.
2. I wanted to support GoG financially rather than Steam.

And a good point was made; it's very likely that in the future GOG will offer Shadowrun Returns with the DLC.