1,300ah deep cycle battery? That would run you ~$3,000. Not to mention that it last for only 1,000 cycles - and only if you never discharge by more than 50%.
Lock-in doesn't require closed source. Look at what Apple does with GCC, they extend the compiler willy-nilly (fully open-source, all of it), and now every Mac ships with a custom GCC that understands lots of additional options, changes the meaning of others, doesn't support some standard options, and produces completely incompatible binaries...
Sure you can apply the Apple patches to mainline GCC, and get the same thing, but that doesn't change the fact the this is lock-in: Mac developers have different expectations about GCC's operation than do linux users.
Whenever I am downloading a torrent, the torrent runs just fine (up to around 650K/s), but they kill my browsing experience. Suddenly the ping command registers pings to well know severs (google, apple, microsoft, yahoo) in excess of 1500 milliseconds - to be contrasted against my normal 55 milliseconds.
The instant I hit the pause button on that torrent, blam! My pings go back to 55ms, and my browser loads pages perfectly. So my question is this: Why in hell would Comcast kill my browsing experience when I am torrenting? The torrent is pulling far more bandwidth than my browsing, and they don't mess with that at all! Maybe they are incorrectly sending TCP resets down the wrong stream?
I am not a heavy torrent user, so it doesn't bother me most of the time - but WOW, OpenOffice, Blizzard trailers, and a whole lot of smaller open-source projects use bittorent as their primary download medium. I probably wouldn't mind slow torrents as much as I mind having my browser fragged!
I thought slashdotters tended to be minimally competent with technology... Those 3 Office suites you mention - and OpenOffice.org as well - work in *exactly* the same way as each other, and even open/save each others files. Sure there are minor differences in the UI, but that is about as far as it goes, and in most versions, even the toolbars look the same.
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1,300ah deep cycle battery? That would run you ~$3,000. Not to mention that it last for only 1,000 cycles - and only if you never discharge by more than 50%.
And then add 50%.
There, fixed.
Lock-in doesn't require closed source. Look at what Apple does with GCC, they extend the compiler willy-nilly (fully open-source, all of it), and now every Mac ships with a custom GCC that understands lots of additional options, changes the meaning of others, doesn't support some standard options, and produces completely incompatible binaries...
Sure you can apply the Apple patches to mainline GCC, and get the same thing, but that doesn't change the fact the this is lock-in: Mac developers have different expectations about GCC's operation than do linux users.
Whenever I am downloading a torrent, the torrent runs just fine (up to around 650K/s), but they kill my browsing experience. Suddenly the ping command registers pings to well know severs (google, apple, microsoft, yahoo) in excess of 1500 milliseconds - to be contrasted against my normal 55 milliseconds.
The instant I hit the pause button on that torrent, blam! My pings go back to 55ms, and my browser loads pages perfectly. So my question is this: Why in hell would Comcast kill my browsing experience when I am torrenting? The torrent is pulling far more bandwidth than my browsing, and they don't mess with that at all! Maybe they are incorrectly sending TCP resets down the wrong stream?
I am not a heavy torrent user, so it doesn't bother me most of the time - but WOW, OpenOffice, Blizzard trailers, and a whole lot of smaller open-source projects use bittorent as their primary download medium. I probably wouldn't mind slow torrents as much as I mind having my browser fragged!
I thought slashdotters tended to be minimally competent with technology... Those 3 Office suites you mention - and OpenOffice.org as well - work in *exactly* the same way as each other, and even open/save each others files. Sure there are minor differences in the UI, but that is about as far as it goes, and in most versions, even the toolbars look the same.
Maybe not, but ever tried running Office 2007 on a Pentium III?