Posts by Psymon

VLC? Pah!

Yes, as several others have pointed out, VLC's a tired old dog. One of the most annoying features is when you hit pause, theres a delay.

What, am I watching this on VHS?

Media Player Classic is a truly well rounded app, but to get around the codec issue, simply download the K-lite codec pack, and choose "Lots of Stuff" during the install, and you get MPC.

Voila, you have high functionality media player, with codecs to to play just about anything, even the Bink and Smacker A/V codecs EA and Codemasters commonly use as the format for their in-game videos. Crucially, because they are system codecs, your other player apps can use them too, improving overall system flexibility.

For disc writing, I've sworn by Ashampoo Burning Studio (ver. 6, the free one) for years, and can count the number of writer drives more easily than the the number of discs I've worked through. Tiny memory footprint, extremely stable, fully featured, delightfully lacking in bloatware and I can run multiple instances, writing to multiple drives simultaniously.

I've used XBMC, and while I have no argument over cross platform issues, the interface is appalling unintuitive for novice users. I know this because I had a system with it set up for my parents in their living room.

No matter how much I tweaked the preferences or themes, they found it just too difficult to navigate.

The solution came with MediaBrowser, an open source plugin for media player which combines similar functionality, incredible beauty, and crucially, ease of use which means my parents, rather than watching telly, frequently browse through the 2TB of movies and TV using the media center remote, with the same ease that they use the DVD player

it's certainly a testament to the robustness of SD memory card technology.

I'm struggling to imagine another data storage medium that could withstand a tour of the human digestive tract.

Mind, I'm now strugglin to imagine another medium that COULD take a tour of the digestive tract.

I cant get the mental image of a man trying to swallow a VHS tape out of my head, now.

I'll bet anything on 3rd party software causing this

My first thought was that it could possibly be a false positive from antivirus software, but I'd guess it's more likely to be a failed malware infection attempt that causes to dll to not be installed/updated correctly during the patching process

yet another storm in a teacup

All this chicken-little knashing of teeth and arm waving is tediously familiar, and smacks of the same paranoia that surrounded CPUID and TPM technologies when they were first introduced.

At the end of the day, this is merely a step toward improving overall security within the OS. As with all the other "controversial" technologies, there will be an option to SWITCH IT OFF in the bios.

There ya go, you can breath again now.

I think this is only the start

When I first heard about MS buying Skype for a ludicrous amount of money, I thought "Meh, another blue-sky venture", but the more I thought about it, the more I realised that this is gonna be big. Really big.

About 18 months ago, we upgraded our phone system due to the company we bought it from going under. We replaced the lot with a new VOIP system.

The handsets were expensive, the software was expensive, the new POE switches were expensive, and the manhours in setting up a complex VLAN to support it... You get the idea.

The reasons we went with a digital VOIP system were many, but included the fact that we could use our existing ethernet infrastructure. As it turns out, the CAT5 wiring is about the only thing that our phones have in common with the rest of our IT infrastructure, and at the end of the day, it still only handles voice calls.

Now imagine Skype being intergrated into Active Directory and Exchange/outlook. The potential savings are incredible. You can buy a USB microphone/speaker in any formfactor you desire for next-to-nothing.

Contact details, routing and out-of-office, all become non-issues, as you already have these set up and configured within AD/Exchange - your phone simply follows your login. Changes and feature adding

Of course, this is all omitting the ADDED features, such as video, conference calling, instant messaging...

If the people consider the reporting the crime is worth less than potentially devaluing the house...

...Then clearly, the 'crime' wasn't worth reporting in the first place.

There once was a time when the police were set up to prevent the daily body turning up in the Thames. Just stop and think about that for a moment. A dead body. In the Thames. Every single day.

Now try and sound serious when you talk about crime rates going up. These days apparently it's a crime serious enough to warrant police intervention when kids are having fun and making noise on the street. Despite the fact that there's nowhere else for them to go. Or your birthday party has gone on til 10.05pm - which is simply intolerable!

What you have to remember is that in general, the "house price worriers" set sit in an almost eclipsical venn diagram state with the "nosy neighbours". The people who come over to tell you off because YOU haven't mown YOUR lawn, and it's making their property look messy by association.

What we have here is a win-win situation. Because the nosy neighbour set will now have to think twice before crying wolf, police resources should be stretched slightly less, kids might get an inch of breathing room, and hopefully, social attitude towards what is now considered a 'crime' may settle a little closer to the tolerant levels

These are not the security holes you are looking for

While these newly discovered vulnerabilities are interesting, you need only look at the change in attack vector by viruses in the wild to realise the depth of change related to windows security in recent years.

Long gone are the days of the of the blaster/sasser worms. Even the dreaded conficker worm uses a combination of social engineering and brute force dictionary attacks.

And the drive-by web based attacks rely on exploiting vulnerabilities in commonly installed software like Acrobat, not the OS itself. There in lies the rub.

All the current security issues on the Windows platform can be laid squarly at the feet of badly written 3rd party software.

It all started when MS ditched the home market DOS based OS and consolidated on the NT platform with XP. Prior to this, people who wrote software for the NT platform understood that it was a network based OS with tightly regimented ACLs, and if they didn't take this into account, their software would not work.

Then came the flood of script kiddies, DOS programmers, and beard-stroking old-school Unix zealots, who refused to comply with the windows security model, making it so diffucult to run as a limited user we have to run as admins, giving anything we double-click on full rights to the entire OS.

"Program Files? that has a space in it, and would require some improvement in my programming skills. I'll just install in the root of C:"

"Windows registry? Looks complex. I'll just write back to config files in my install directory"

The net result is that as a sysadmin, you spend days tightly locking down your windows environment, and then weeks punching dirty great holes in it again to get badly written software working. No wonder you're average home user is vulnerable, They've been conditioned into thinking that every bit of software out there needs direct kernel access and sufficient rights to re-partition your hard disk, just so it can self-update.

Firefox behaves like a virus, trying to write-back to its program folder when updating (instead of using an installed service). I've seen Google Chrome install itself into the users profile folder before! Don't think the open source crowd do any better. The first thing that happens when you launch GIMP, is it does a great steaming dump all over your user profile. You'd think by the way these programs behaved the coders had never actually seen a windows computer before in their life.

When these 3rd party programs finally start using the now decade old, well documented windows security model, then so can we! On that day, we will be genuinely worried by the UAC pop-up, rather that just assuming it's Mozillas crappy updating routine.

Interesting points here

Only a handful of trolls out today, which is quite refreshing.

@Torquemada

If I remember correctly, it was the other way round? Netscape BEGAN by selling their product for £30.

Microsoft entered the market, also punting their product for roughly the same price. Unfortunately for MS, theirs was vastly inferior to Netscapes, and didn't sell. Unfortunately for Netscape, MS had extremely deep pockets, and began giving it away for free, then going on to bundling it with the OS.

It was at this point, Netscape began giving away their product, in a last desperate bid to stay alive. Since Netscape had no other means of revenue generation, it didn't take long for them to go under. This was long before the large-scale "free software" movement. A movement that has only recently become possible due to the many alternate revenue generation means made available by the now, well established internet.

@unicomp21

I'm certainly very interested in FF4 (especially the tab management system), but IMHO the 3D aspect is going to be a mere gimmick for some time yet. Don't forget that 3D on the web has been tried many, many times before.

Not just VRML, but 3D content has also been available through Flash and Shockwave for many years (albeit Flash used extra plugins) and has been used quite successfully for a great many web-based games, but whole websites?

Also, the OpenGL standard has been languishing for some time now. Remember that it's the games industry which has pushed 3D standards to their now dizzying heights, and like it or lump it, the vehicle of choice for this progress has been DirectX for a long time now.

MS has worked very closely with the games and graphics industries over the years, folding new innovations into DX. Whether you approve of their methods, the end result is the undeniably powerful DX11.

GL is a poor showing by comparrison, and because of this, the vast majority of consumer level cards pay little more than a token guesture for hardware support.

features in IE

I used to religously use firefox as my faithful browserfor close to knocking on ten years. I'd tried Opera, and while it had some nice features (and some very gimmicky) I found it struggled to render some pages.

I, like a great many reading/posting on this article, had settled into a comfortable groove. After all, if it ain't broke, why fix it? Then my 7yr old OS install started to crumble. I had literally hundreds of programs installed, and a mixed graphics card setup that made reinstalling nigh impossible.

First Firefox stopped working, despite several hours trying to coax it back to life. Months later, Opera flaked out.

I only give you the backstory because it took this much preassure to to force me to fire up the old blue e. Never been updated, it only took a few minutes of fighting with v6 before I downloaded 8.

Yes, it was slow. Yes it was clunky. There was feature that immediately jumped out, though. The ease at which you could add your own custom search providers.

With FF, you had to rely on the website providing a link. Most of which were more interested in installing yet another bloody toolbar full of spy/adware. I did have a search on how to manualy create one, but it involved writing some javascript, copying the file to the right location...

TLDR!

I filed it away in my favourites with the intent of having another look when I had some genuine time to waste.

IE changed all that. When you click the add search provider, there's a link at the bottom called "Create Your Own Search Provider". It's so easy to use, (search your target website with the word TEST, copy the resultant URL, paste in the box and give it a name) that I began to add websites which I wouldn't have originally considered worth the effort.

The real game-changer though, is using them through the internet accelerator. Highlight a bit of text on any given website, click the accelerator icon, choose a search from the list, and it opens that website with the search results from the text you selected in a new tab.

This sounds medicore, until you spend a few seconds creating a set of search providers customised to your browsing. Then you begin to realise your getting through the web faster and in fewer clicks than ever before.

Obviously, Still being on V8s crappy javascript engine, the whole streamlined experience would grind to a halt. This pushed me to download the IE9 beta (admitedly a very late one). Suddenly, all the random halts were fixed, and it loads up on my old P4D faster than any other browser.

I've no doubt FF4 will improve on things. They're claiming even better JS engine, and the tab management feature looks amazing. On the flipside, Mozilla update mechanism is nothing short of retarded. Not only does the self-update break every security rule of the WIndows OS set out since XP, but it does this on startup of the application?!?

Either way, this is all healthy competition, and is spurring the market forwards

@rattus rattus

Yes. Yes, they have indeed buggered up the configuration. What you have described smacks of a lack of planning and/or understanding.

I've been building and implementing a multi-site SCCM infrastucture for about two years now, and while I can certainly understand the duanting complexity of the SCCM system, the power and flexability is staggering.

Our desktop environments vary wildly in their hardware/software setup, so an image-based OS deployment system like RIS, Ghost, or WDS is completely impractical. The difference between those and SCCM is dramatic. Our server Has the drivers and software for every machine, and applies them intelligently during setup.

SCCM takes a lot of investment of time to get right, but once it is, it's magic. One example is we have a large number of machines with M-Audio soundcards. M-Audio haven't written their drivers correctly, so the OS deployment will install the drivers, but not the software needed to configure them (this is possible, as the Intel Media Graphics Accelorator does this correctly).

To compensate, I have a collection whose membership rule is that the machine has said M-Audio card. I then have a sub-collection whose membership rule is that the machine DOES NOT have the M-Audio software. A Silent install is advertised to that sub collection. These get updated each time the machine performs a scheduled hardware inventory, so it's all completely automated.

The collection rules can be based on any information that can be collected from Active directory, network information or the WMI repository. I've found that the WMI can tell you the serial number off the battery in the laptop, if you know how to ask it!

Sounds like your guys are running the site in mixed-mode rather than native. That's why a second computer account is generated after the OS deployment.

You can avoid inputting the mac address by simply joining the computer to the domain, pushing the SCCM client out, and then adding it to the OS deployment collection. I've done this a few times, but I've often found that OEM Windows install takes so long to do its' initial configuration, it's quicker to input the mac and run a bare-metal deployment via pxe.

Dell are the best for this. Not only do they routinely put the mac on the outside of the packaging, but when you enter the service tag on their site, you can download a CAB file containing all the drivers, which you can import straight into SCCM. No mess, no fuss.

The software suite we install during OS deployment is a pretty standard afair, again, because all the systems are so different. You can create rules during the task sequence that check for variables, but I found it easier to keep that part simple, and have software advertisments based on the computers OU container, group memberships, and the most commonly logged on user.

It doesn't deploy all the software during the initial setup, but we give it to the user, and the silent installs cause no disruption. They just suddenly find a new program in their start menu.

nature vs science

Indeed, barrels are used thoughout nature. As for chemical explosions, much rarer, but they do exsist.

The bombardier beetle releases two chemical simultaniously from its abdomen. If Wickipedia is accurate, hydroquinone and hydrogen peroxide, which react violently, deterring predators.

Nature is amazing on many levels, but don't let the hippies fool you. The overwhelming majority of machines we produce are vastly more efficient at their task than natures solutions.

Flight, for example. Your average Boeing uses far less energy to achieve flight than any bird or insect. Nature can't even build a land animal of the same weight, let alone for flight.

In fact, the heaviest animal ever known is the blue whale, tipping in at 180 metric tons, The Antonov An-225 could quite happily fly said whale, with 70 tons spare for provisions to keep our whale alive and in relative comfort during the 2,500 mile journey, faster than any lifeform at 500mph.

This is primarily due to the infinately rotatable axel. Something nature can never achieve.

We have long since outrun nature in everything we strive for.

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason,

how infinite in faculties, in form and moving,

how express and admirable in action, how like an angel in apprehension,

how like a god!

EXT probs

Our Unix guy isn't here right now, so I can't get all the grizzly details, but our fileserver gave us equally unexpected and unpleasant results when we started tripping over its’ hidden limits.

We have a Unix baox attached to a SAN with approximately 4Tb storage, which at the time we considered ample capability for its job. It didn’t take long before we hit the dreaded inode limit.

As I say, I can’t remember all the precise details, but the EXT filessystem, formatted over a certain size (1 or 2 TB) assumes that the average size of each file will be around 1GB, and therefore allots an appropriate number of Inodes for this assumption.

If your average filesize is closer to a few KB, your Inodes run out loooong before you reach the drives space capacity. When he investigated this, he naturally assumed he chosen an incorrect option when creating the partition. After significant research, he discovered the was the default, and only configuration.

hahahaha!

I love some of the suggestions that appeared between composing and posting my last comment!

@Russel Howe

Please tell me you're joking!

Pull out the hard drive? What, one hard drive containing 60m files? Or even a server, and it has ONE hard drive?!? This isn't the 70s, Rus.

1) it's at minimum RAID 5 array, quite possibly utilising the raid controller built into the servers motherboard. The raid controller is integral to keeping the data readable

2) You don't just 'pull out hard drive' on a server. In all likelyhood, that machine is still live, and hosting a miriad of roles and services for the network.

@Zax

I'll give you 10/10 for optimism there. Xcopy would have failed just like the other commandline tools Trevor had tried. I've seen many a solution using insanely complex batch and kix scripts fail time and time again. The simple fact of the matter is that in a complex environment such as this, scripted systems invariably fail due to the unexpected and unforeseeable.

@Zaf

We have actually had to shift FROM a unix file server, TO a windows system. Over 2 terrabytes, we encountered severe limitations with the filesystem. That being we were regularly exceeding the inode limitations. After several weeks of research, we discovered that this was a fundamental design flaw of the filesystem, which assumed over that size the partition was going to be filled with files greater that 1Gb, not tens of millions of 1Kb files.

On top of that, Unix has a less advance Kerberos implementation, meaning computer account permisions could not be applied, and the time saving benefits of giving users access to Volume Shadow Copy dynamic restores meant were weren't forever routing through tape backups for every user that accidentally overwrote their word document.

have to agree with harryhedgehog

As a home user I was a devout AVG user for many years, but compared to MSSE, AVG is a total resource hog, and not very effective at it's job.

One annoyance with AVG is it's schizophrenic behaviour when an infected file gets lodged in a system restore point. Despite the infected file being completely inert (unless of course you put your machine back to that restore point) the monitoring component will periodically scream VIRUS! VIRUS!

So, you run the scanner across your entire hard disk, at the end of which it comes up "dunno what you're on about, mate. No virus here" because it can't access the System Volume Information.

Symantecs' product is less than useless. The first sign of a virus, and it curls up in a corner crying "Not in the face, not in the face!" You can tell your machine may have brushed by some 10 year old malware, because the Norton icon in the system tray is disabled, and you can't re-enable it. Oh, and the firewall in it continues to block software on your computer from accessing the net even AFTER YOU UNINSTALL IT!

Mcaffee have come up with an interesting solution. They install so much crap on your system it s-l-o-w-s... t-o... a... c-r-a-w-l. Your computer is literally too slow to catch a cold.

Sophos is an arrogant little turd. You fire up your computer, log in, and it essentially shouts "STOP EVERYTHING YOU ARE DOING! I'm updating myself." It seems to grab nearly every resource off you for the simple act of self-update. And don't get me started on the false positives!

Compared to this lot, MSSE isn't just out in front, it's lapped them several times

I'd have to agree with Ku...

What piqued my interest in Winpho7 was the underlying engine.

With shifted a great many in-house intra-services to .net, because the visual studio development environment is top notch.

This potentially opens some very interesting integration opportunities.

Time will tell...

Horses for courses indeed

While parallelisation can benefit a great many applications in general, there are also a great many algorythms which simply have to be serially processed, due to the next part relying on results from the prior code

Plus the greater the number of processes/threads, the greater the overhead of managing them becomes.

Ray tracing is a classic example. While chucking cores at a single image being rendered will greatly increase speed, you quickly hit a wall, due to each pixels colour being dependant on its' adjacent pixels (and further), due to anti-aliasing, specular flare, and other physical effects that simply aren't known until the other nearby pixels have been calculated.

In this scenario, 2,4, or even 8 cores will produce dramatic benefit when you split the image up into chunks and render each simultaniously, but each chunk then has to be 'stiched' together at the seams, and this generates more work than if the overall image had been done in one peice. Still a massive benefit overall.

But what happens when you have a 1:1 ratio of pixel to processor? The render re-hashing would be horrific, not just you the system, but also for the poor programmer who would have to figure out how to code for every pixel adjusting itelf to its adjacent, while that pixel is also still adjusting?

At least they appologised

I seem to remember Google had some similar problems early on with their cloud services.

Their response was more along the lines of "Meh. Something happened. We fixed it."

Not exactly a comforting response when your business is utterly dependant on said service.

blookin social networking cr*p

I wish MS would stop trying to ape Apple with and their ilk by offering useless fluff.

Windows Phone 7 is not going to make a dent in the the fluff market. Apple and google have sewn it up tight.

It's the corporate market that redmond really need to focus on. Never mind bloody facebook/twatter contacts, how about a user friendly means of filtering and searching exchange/ldap contacts?

WP7 is apparently based on the core of 7, with the ability to bolt on modular extra components from the full-fat version, like Location and Sensors and Bitlocker.

Now that I can see as being useful. Your field engineer wakes up in the morning, switches on his phone, and starts receiving his synchronised calender schedule for the day which was automatically generated from the call centre booking system.

All customer details are secured using bitlocker, the GPS unit tied into location and Sensors, then feeds the times and locations into some autoroute type software, and plots out the optimal journey (I know, I know.), and the customers contact details for that day would automatically generate a quick-access contact list.

Finally, because this is essentially a 'proper' windows platform, all phones can be managed in the same way as we would laptops, with software updates and configurations automatically managed through SCCM and group policy.

This is only touching on the potential offered by the ever aloof 'unified platform'.

Redmond are tantilisingly close this time, just as long as they don't fumble the ball.

You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one...

Actually...

Firstly, ripping the contents of a game to hard disk vastly speeds loading times.

Games are expensive, and discs get lost or scratched. Yes, Blu-ray too. The odds of either happening are vastly reduced if you only use the disc occasionally.

Sony PS3s are notorious for frequently breaking optical drives. Sony also charge more than £100 to replace what is essentially, a £20 blu-ray reader.

This also opens up the potential for "bedroom programming". Something that has been long, long lost amongst the endless parade of stale sequels.

These are not the veiled arguments of a pirate attempting to defend his illegal ways, these are the legitimate reasons I have not bought a console since 1998.

Yours sincerely, a lost customer.

I suspect underlying drive is win7 compatability

While Firefox certainly runs on win7, there were a few integration aspects that were suspicious by their abscence.

Most noticable, was the lack of support for taskbar grouping of the tabs. I was pleasantly suprised to see that Opera had this feature almost from the outset.

It's nice to see a bit of healthy competition in the browser market now, especially the refreshed focus on performance. FF and IE are both a bit lethargic on startup. IE is terrible with javascript, and new tab generation is appallingy slow.

Opera still has some rendering issues. Certain javascript image rollover functions cause it to 'jump' back to the top of the page, making it virtually unusable with certain large thumbnail gallery pages.

IE has the edge when it comes to adding search providers. While with others you need to find a pre-configured link, or fiddle with config files, Microsoft provide a "Create your own search provider" link. SImply search TEST on the website of your choice, paster the resulting URL in the box, give it a name, and click 'Add'.

IEs Internet Accelerator feature is a killer app once you figure out how to customise it properly. Combined with your own custom search providers, it makes very short work of finding content related to a certain phrase across multiple sites, and is my browser of choice for these types of tasks.

Opera is very feature rich, but I don't think I'm alone when I say I've browsed through the options, and gone "oooh, that's a cool feature" and then never used them again, or tried to use them, and found it too much work with little gain. Voice recognition and Gestures spring to mind.

Firefox on the other hand, relies almost entirely on add-ins to be 'feature rich'. While this is not a bad thing per say and adds a modular approach, it does quite often lend to stability and performance issues.

snigger

"Apple started pulling off porn apps..."

No THAT's hypocrasy!

Oh come on!

It's blatantly obvious what's happened, and if she'd engaged her clearly seldom used brain for just a few seconds, she'd have realised the resumption she jumped clearly makes no sense whatsoever. Why? Why would some guy in the workshop load this stuff ONTO a customers phone? I mean sure, having a rumage round for naughties and possibly copying them off, but what's to be gained from loading them on?

the main board was clearly reconditioned, but some numpty forgot to wipe the memory (like the unwashed swathe that get regularly shipped to china).

Consumers have this weird fantasy that when their electronic device is sent for repair, brand new components are manufactured and then fitted 'hot off the press', as it were.

If you have a computer with a burnt out PSU, but a perfectly good mobo, and another with a knackered mobo but functional PSU, what would you do? Why would you think any other repair shop would do different?

90% of the time, the production run on a particular electronic design is so short that brand new spare parts will all be gone within a year.

£10 sounds perfectly resonable. Yeah, he forgot to press the format button. Here's a tenner for the 30 seconds of time it will take for you to do it yourself.

So no, dear. Noone's had their 'filthy paws' all over your phone except the over worked, underpaid engineer who swapped out the mainboard that was previously owned by a red blooded guy with a healthy sex drive.

It's a shame there isn't another undiscovered continent like America, where we can ship these Prudes before they plunge us into another psychologically damaging Victorian period, where chair legs must be covered, and your young son is trussed up at night to prevent him masturbating (the bitrthplace of BDSM)

wow

compared to the quotes i've seen elsewhere that's a pretty good deal!

Certainly worth baring in mind when we get the odd-bod who insists on storing stuff locally. certainly more cost effective than high maintenance and troublesome client backup solutions

I suppose emerging technology is always viewed in this way...

Why would we ever need any more than 640K of RAM?

Why the hell would I want my computer to be permenantly connected to the internet?

With technologies like this, you need to put the horse and cart the other way round. Throw the tech out there, and see what people can do with it.

I can think of a couple of minor uses for it (nothing earth shattering) but if the techs readily available, some bright spark will come up with something that'll make you think "Oh, yeah. Why didn't I think of that!"

It'll be nice to see GL get some DX support. It has languished a bit from lack of mainstream hw and sw support. The last ever game written it it was released 12 years ago.

Before the trolls jump on that, yes I know there are plenty of applications that use GL (I do raytracing myself) but we're talking numbers here, boys.

When it comes to native hardware support, GL really does need to tap into the readily available. After, who's gonna buy a £500 nvidia Quadro card to surf the web?

Oh good grief

I would guestimate that the job description writers intentions were most likely to specify a language skillset, or perhaps even intimate cultural knowlage, but due to the many dialects employed in India decided to truncate their requirements into a rather unfortunate wording.

I wish local bodies would become this irate over real threats to human rights

Next door to Roysten Vasey?

This is a local event, for local people! There's no parking for you here!

here we are

Gleened from these very pages:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/12/04/ms_tightens_ip_grip/

I suspect this is the same cause for legal wranglings with TomTom.

There's no reason your Lights Out embedded linux or whatever environment should HAVE to use FAT, or any other filesystem - it will be the only one using it.

Fileservers though... Fairy 'nuff, in _normal_ operation the internal filesystem shouldn't matter (unless it doesn't support extensible metadata used by the clients).

But, when the fit hits the shan, unless your server is using RAID5, any customer would naturally expect the ability to remove the drives from failed server, and read them using another host machine. You don't want to discover that your precious data is effectively 'encrypted' in some obscure filesystem.

I'm not saying ext3 is obscure, of course I'm just highlighting a flaw in your logical thinking.

That said, I also wouldn't be overly pleased with my "server" using FAT or FAT32. neither of which have particularly robust error correction hashes