Time capsule on a Drobo and dropbox mostly.

2TB is plenty of room for most people to get a robust incremental backup scheme going. I'm running Time Machine on a 500GB drive myself.

Wow. With all the talk of people learning how to program, I thought this looked interesting. http://onemorelevel.com/game/lightbot_2 Easy game if you're a pro, but still.

That reminds me of my favorite programming game evar:

Manufactoria

Sweetness, you can basically build any spygear you need with these things. Would be sick if they had wireless networking

That's how I do it except I have a 120GB SDD for OS+programs and 1TB HDDs for storage

I refuse to associate Apple with user friendly. They did belive the one button mouse was a good idea after all. More like cutesy-artsy.

Only Apple product I have ever owned is a Powerbook G4. It was a lot nicer than pretty much all laptops out there at the time and the battery life is pretty good.
It still has irking design flaws like the amazing hardwareclock-fail and I never liked OSX (removed it after a week of playing with it)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_%28video_game%29



http://www.thehouseofgames.net/index.php?t=10&id=387

I'd hadn't thought of it until just now, but, Dominion the card game is very close to being a programming game.

Robot Rally is a pretty good programming game

Intel creates a 3d chip.

http://www.tacticalneuronics.com/content/aiw3dnew.asp

(it's also a good thing to get kids interested in programming)

I am currently playing around with http://www.dollydrive.com/ . I think its an amazing idea, but so far its been quite slow from the UK. They have told me that they are opening their UK data centre at the end of the month to, which should boost performance.

Does anyone know much about trademarking? If you set up a web business as a Ltd company, with say 1 product, how important is it to trademark:

- Your Ltd. Business name (Widgets Ltd)
- Your product name (Widget Maker 2)

It's an expense I'm looking at (around £500) but am just considering how important people think this is if you are expecting success and longevity in the market.

I backup all of my data to two 2 TB USB external drives (you can frequently find them for sale on Slickdeals) and critical stuff (current project code, porn, etc) to my Dropbox.

I use some random freeware backup software I found that works just fine. At work right now and cba to RDP into my home PC to figure it out, but there are plenty of good products out there that make it simple.

Thought this didn't warrant its own thread.
It's sort of a project for uni, not exactly but similar enough.

It's a biology problem, and we are a group of students in a biology-ish field. However, we're now working on a computer problem which all of us aren't that strong in.
There is a program that makes a sort of flowchart that shows the optimal way to proceed biologically. However, they now modified that program to not only show the optimal way, but also every other way with a sort of 'score' between them to get more information. I realize this is very vague, but the actual biological significance of these 'networks' is not important, our job right now is to find some way to compare the optimal and non-optimal versions and gather as much info out of it as we can.

The first thing we thought is that we're going to have to learn something like network theory or something. But I thought hey, let's ask the 2p2 whizkids if they can give me some input.

I realize this is very vague, but I hoped someone would maybe recognize my description and can associate it with something.

So you have some proprietary computer program that shows you the scores of each biological evolutionary step?

How is the data returned to you? Is the program an executable you run? Is it a web application?

The first step in analyzing this data involves collecting it. Assess how hard it is to collect all the data in a simple database or spreadsheet.

All the data, which are the results of the program are delivered to us.
They are in a graphical form depicting the different flowchart/networks, but we can also get them in a xml text form. It is probably not very hard to make a database out of it, they might even have done that already (confidential etc., we don't get all the info just the bare minimum that we need).
The assignment is more to act like a thinktank however, we (hopefully) don't have to program any analysis we propose (although it would be a plus if we can show a small sample of what we mean), they just want a biological view on what could be important to distill extra information.

You could use any scripting language (PHP would be my choice) to convert the XML documents to associative arrays and insert them into a MySQL database. From there, you could do all sorts of interesting analysis and get the data back in many different forms.

Tough to tell you what to do from here since I can't see the program, can't see the XML, and have no idea what you want to do with the data. But that's a start.

That's kind of the point, you mention you can do all sorts of interesting analysis, that's the point that we want to think of, exactly WHAT can we do. We don't have to do it, just create ideas about nifty stuff we can make with it.

Is there a place where I can read about this or could you give me some pointers where I could find some of these interesting analysis possibilities?
Thanks!

Sounds like a standard project for a 3rd party to me.

Regression techniques, neural net processing, etc. Google. I can't invent analysis techniques for datasets that are unknown to me.

Look at genetic algorithms as well, I can't really tell what you are trying to do but it sounds like they could possibly fit in quite well.

Not 100% sure what you are asking - is the analysis based on the score or the topology [ie: structure] of these flow charts? If the latter, then it might be a good idea to read the Wiki page on graph theory and learn the terminology, etc:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_theory

There are all sorts of things you can "measure" about the graphs and then make a comparison based on these features.

If this isn't what you want then please make a post with some pictures (even badly drawn MS-paint will be fine) describing what you are doing with simple example(s) and we might be able to better help then.

Juk

Yep, I basically have no idea what Slick is trying to analyse.

That said, even a very detailed description would probably leave me with few suggestions on what is the best way to analyse his data.