It's not the gamers that soak up your bandwidth, it's people using P2P software. Games still use relatively little bandwidth per user (especially compared to P2P).
Dynamic IP addresses simply don't make sense for broadband (they did for dialup when there were 12 users per IP, but for broadband you need one IP per user because it's now always on).
In fact, they make it worse for the internet community as a whole. If ISPs only gave static IPs for broadband, it'd be a lot easier to ban trolls and we woudln't have Slashdot banning entire IP blocks from posting. It'd also be easier to maintain things like the XBL.
I'm from Britain, and I have friends in Utah (I lived in Texas for 6 years and met them in Texas - they subsequently moved).
Utah is not backward. Although there are a lot of Mormons around (and like Jehovah's Witnesses, are into door-to-door proselytizing), they never bothered me.
There's actually good beer brewed there (despite the Mormon church's opposition to even caffiene, let alone alcohol), which indicates that despite the Mormon majority, you aren't persecuted for being not Mormon.
Geographically, most of Utah is an area of outstanding natural beauty. There's some of the best skiing in the world up in the mountains (and even though I'm back in the British Isles, I prefer Utah for skiing), and in the summer, there's great hiking territory. As another poster pointed out though, the dry heat can be a bit unbearable (and like me, I suspect you'll find that a humid heat is much more tolerable than a dry heat).
A little bit of trivia. The air you breathe on a passenger jet comes from the engines (one of the stages in the high-pressure compressor). In a pressurized piston engined aircraft, the air you breathe comes from the turbocharger.
If I was still a student - yes - free is MUCH better than $100. Let's see - no income, having to live off savings and possibly temporary jobs during the vacation and still sinking into debt - that $100 is needed for food and beer, thanks.
The most fearful one is the sunbeam. It makes people turn browner. It's why I hide in my mom's basement under the cool glow of flourescent tubes and LCD monitors all day long, to avoid the terrible sun beams...
In Britain, yellow lines only appear on the side of the road (to indicate parking restrictions - a double yellow line running down the side of the road means no parking). White lines mark the centre.
Your TV is *not* 100fps. It is 25 fps (nominally 50 refreshes per second, interlaced to provide 25fps, but newer high quality TVs double scan to reduce flicker). What happens is the film is played 4% faster so it runs at 25fps for encoding for PAL/SECAM televisions. (For NTSC, which is 30fps, much more monkey-motion must be done to convert to NTSC since you can't just speed up the film by that much).
The fact that the word 'piracy' was attached to copyright infringement in 1771 doesn't make it any less inappropriate or any less grandstanding. It's still inappropriate to compare violence and robbery on the high seas to copyright infringement.
I'll say this slowly as so few people seem to work it out by themselves.
Slashdot isn't one person. Many people write comments on Slashdot. The people who say "They are my mail servers, I can drop any mail I want to" may not necessarily be the same people who disagree with Hotmail's plans. Similarly, the people who complain about GPL violators are not necessarily the same people who want to freely violate proprietary software licenses. Etc.
Since Slashdot replies are made by many individuals, it is therefore unsurprising (and in fact predictable) that you aren't going to see a unified Slashdot opinion, and indeed, two different comments may have diametrically opposed viewpoints!
I only use the iTunes Music Store because JHymn exists. If I couldn't easily strip the DRM off the tunes and copy the files to my home server for use on any of my PCs, not just the PowerBook, I simply wouldn't bother with iTMS. The day I can no longer easily strip off DRM is the day I stop buying music.
Makes me even less willing to use eBay, even though the only time I've used it so far (to buy a used Sun Ultra 5) it all worked out fine.
BTW: That thing about the US Embassy in your JE - it's merely part of the INS's Foreigner Dehumanization Programme, and the Embassy in London is particularly bad (although not as bad as the ones in India, apparently). I've had to visit that awful place 3 times (I worked in the US for 6 years). Once I had my visa refused by the Embassy (which had been approved by the INS in the USA already) because the form I used was "out of date". So I downloaded the new form off the embassy website, and it was EXACTLY THE SAME AS THE OLD FORM WITH A DIFFERENT DATE AT THE BOTTOM!
Get a Sony Digital-8 camera. It records in DV format on Hi-8/Digital-8 tapes, and can play back 8 and Hi-8 (and output them out the Firewire port). Stick your Hi-8 tapes in the camcorder, and play them to your computer. Even if you don't have a Firewire port, the adapters are very cheap.
Better still, buy Digital-8. I've found it to be robust, my Sony Digital-8 camera has had pretty rough treatment since I've had it (and has the dents and scratches in the casing to show for it!)
I'm not certain how well hard disks will stand up to shocks. I've got a separate 'bullet camera' and recorder for attaching to gliders and light aircraft, and I purposely avoided the hard disk recorders because I'm not sure they'll be as G-tolerant as a tape drive. I went for a Digital-8 recorder (I've found the Sony Digital-8 camcorders to be able to take quite a beating).
But Gates won't be at the top of MS forever by Linus's standard. Gates is 50. Linus will still likely be of workforce age when Gates is being buried.
In 20 years time, when MS is no longer run by its founders, but rather businessmen with no passion for the products - what Linus says may very well come true.
The weather analogy is not a good one - we've only had maybe a century of accurately recorded weather, and much less than that of trying to accurately predict short-term weather.
But I agree, predicting the future is at best a guess.
However, there are some things that are NOT guesses. Bill Gates is 50 this year. Steve Ballmer is about the same age. The Microsoft founders will be dead within my lifetime, and within Linus's lifetime too. When Linus is 50, still holding a burning passion for Linux, Gates will be an elderly man. Their place may be taken over by CEOs and high execs with the same vision and drive and passion for Microsoft...but probably not. Microsoft will in all likelyhood move from a company driven by passionate leaders to Yet Another Megacorp. Just like IBM. Just like General Motors. Just like Ford. It won't disappear, but I think there's a good chance it'll lose the instinct that got it on top, and it may well lose much of its dominance.
He was a pioneer, but without him the world would have been hardly different. Noyce independently invented the IC too. If it hadn't been Noyce, someone else would have done it. There were probably dozens of people who would have developed the IC within 5 years - it's just he was first.
Well, as for personal preference - I had been using iptables for at least two years before I started using OpenBSD's 'pf' - so by all rights, I should prefer iptables over 'pf' due to familiarity.
I found pf more functional and easier to configure, so I went to the effort of moving Linux firewalls to OpenBSD ones. It also helps that the standard OpenBSD install can be done in roughly 10 minutes once you know what you're doing.
The trouble with online documentation...when you REALLY need the docs, it's usually because you've buggered something up and you can't go online. Online docs are no use if you can't read them. There is no subsitute for having a clear and concise manpage on the local disk!
I've found OpenBSD's documentation the best OSS docs I've found so far - I rarely have to go further than the manpage to figure something out. BSD's hardware support isn't horrible for servery/firewally things - I've not found any commonly used hardware (save Winmodems) that's not supported by OpenBSD.
I'll give it you for slide printing, but printing from colour negatives is just awful. (I always found slide printing much easier, especially in getting a good colour balance, and Ilfochrome is superb).
India is a very large country. It has areas with severe weather, and areas without. It has geologically active areas and geologically inactive areas. You can't make that sort of generality.
It's like us in Europe saying we won't buy American stuff because there's earthquakes in California. If the widget you are buying is made in New Jersey, it's not important.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not the gamers that soak up your bandwidth, it's people using P2P software. Games still use relatively little bandwidth per user (especially compared to P2P).
Dynamic IP addresses simply don't make sense for broadband (they did for dialup when there were 12 users per IP, but for broadband you need one IP per user because it's now always on).
In fact, they make it worse for the internet community as a whole. If ISPs only gave static IPs for broadband, it'd be a lot easier to ban trolls and we woudln't have Slashdot banning entire IP blocks from posting. It'd also be easier to maintain things like the XBL.
I'm from Britain, and I have friends in Utah (I lived in Texas for 6 years and met them in Texas - they subsequently moved).
Utah is not backward. Although there are a lot of Mormons around (and like Jehovah's Witnesses, are into door-to-door proselytizing), they never bothered me.
There's actually good beer brewed there (despite the Mormon church's opposition to even caffiene, let alone alcohol), which indicates that despite the Mormon majority, you aren't persecuted for being not Mormon.
Geographically, most of Utah is an area of outstanding natural beauty. There's some of the best skiing in the world up in the mountains (and even though I'm back in the British Isles, I prefer Utah for skiing), and in the summer, there's great hiking territory. As another poster pointed out though, the dry heat can be a bit unbearable (and like me, I suspect you'll find that a humid heat is much more tolerable than a dry heat).
Virtually all the PCs I've come across in the last couple of years will boot from USB. In fact, it's unusual now if they can't boot from USB.
A little bit of trivia. The air you breathe on a passenger jet comes from the engines (one of the stages in the high-pressure compressor). In a pressurized piston engined aircraft, the air you breathe comes from the turbocharger.
If I was still a student - yes - free is MUCH better than $100. Let's see - no income, having to live off savings and possibly temporary jobs during the vacation and still sinking into debt - that $100 is needed for food and beer, thanks.
The most fearful one is the sunbeam. It makes people turn browner. It's why I hide in my mom's basement under the cool glow of flourescent tubes and LCD monitors all day long, to avoid the terrible sun beams...
In Britain, yellow lines only appear on the side of the road (to indicate parking restrictions - a double yellow line running down the side of the road means no parking). White lines mark the centre.
Your TV is *not* 100fps. It is 25 fps (nominally 50 refreshes per second, interlaced to provide 25fps, but newer high quality TVs double scan to reduce flicker). What happens is the film is played 4% faster so it runs at 25fps for encoding for PAL/SECAM televisions. (For NTSC, which is 30fps, much more monkey-motion must be done to convert to NTSC since you can't just speed up the film by that much).
The fact that the word 'piracy' was attached to copyright infringement in 1771 doesn't make it any less inappropriate or any less grandstanding. It's still inappropriate to compare violence and robbery on the high seas to copyright infringement.
I'll say this slowly as so few people seem to work it out by themselves.
Slashdot isn't one person. Many people write comments on Slashdot. The people who say "They are my mail servers, I can drop any mail I want to" may not necessarily be the same people who disagree with Hotmail's plans. Similarly, the people who complain about GPL violators are not necessarily the same people who want to freely violate proprietary software licenses. Etc.
Since Slashdot replies are made by many individuals, it is therefore unsurprising (and in fact predictable) that you aren't going to see a unified Slashdot opinion, and indeed, two different comments may have diametrically opposed viewpoints!
I only use the iTunes Music Store because JHymn exists. If I couldn't easily strip the DRM off the tunes and copy the files to my home server for use on any of my PCs, not just the PowerBook, I simply wouldn't bother with iTMS. The day I can no longer easily strip off DRM is the day I stop buying music.
Makes me even less willing to use eBay, even though the only time I've used it so far (to buy a used Sun Ultra 5) it all worked out fine.
BTW: That thing about the US Embassy in your JE - it's merely part of the INS's Foreigner Dehumanization Programme, and the Embassy in London is particularly bad (although not as bad as the ones in India, apparently). I've had to visit that awful place 3 times (I worked in the US for 6 years). Once I had my visa refused by the Embassy (which had been approved by the INS in the USA already) because the form I used was "out of date". So I downloaded the new form off the embassy website, and it was EXACTLY THE SAME AS THE OLD FORM WITH A DIFFERENT DATE AT THE BOTTOM!
I suspect the choice is: if you don't sell to Microsoft when they want to buy you, they'll just crush you instead.
Get a Sony Digital-8 camera. It records in DV format on Hi-8/Digital-8 tapes, and can play back 8 and Hi-8 (and output them out the Firewire port). Stick your Hi-8 tapes in the camcorder, and play them to your computer. Even if you don't have a Firewire port, the adapters are very cheap.
Better still, buy Digital-8. I've found it to be robust, my Sony Digital-8 camera has had pretty rough treatment since I've had it (and has the dents and scratches in the casing to show for it!)
I'm not certain how well hard disks will stand up to shocks. I've got a separate 'bullet camera' and recorder for attaching to gliders and light aircraft, and I purposely avoided the hard disk recorders because I'm not sure they'll be as G-tolerant as a tape drive. I went for a Digital-8 recorder (I've found the Sony Digital-8 camcorders to be able to take quite a beating).
But Gates won't be at the top of MS forever by Linus's standard. Gates is 50. Linus will still likely be of workforce age when Gates is being buried.
In 20 years time, when MS is no longer run by its founders, but rather businessmen with no passion for the products - what Linus says may very well come true.
The weather analogy is not a good one - we've only had maybe a century of accurately recorded weather, and much less than that of trying to accurately predict short-term weather.
But I agree, predicting the future is at best a guess.
However, there are some things that are NOT guesses. Bill Gates is 50 this year. Steve Ballmer is about the same age. The Microsoft founders will be dead within my lifetime, and within Linus's lifetime too. When Linus is 50, still holding a burning passion for Linux, Gates will be an elderly man. Their place may be taken over by CEOs and high execs with the same vision and drive and passion for Microsoft...but probably not. Microsoft will in all likelyhood move from a company driven by passionate leaders to Yet Another Megacorp. Just like IBM. Just like General Motors. Just like Ford. It won't disappear, but I think there's a good chance it'll lose the instinct that got it on top, and it may well lose much of its dominance.
He was a pioneer, but without him the world would have been hardly different. Noyce independently invented the IC too. If it hadn't been Noyce, someone else would have done it. There were probably dozens of people who would have developed the IC within 5 years - it's just he was first.
Well, as for personal preference - I had been using iptables for at least two years before I started using OpenBSD's 'pf' - so by all rights, I should prefer iptables over 'pf' due to familiarity.
I found pf more functional and easier to configure, so I went to the effort of moving Linux firewalls to OpenBSD ones. It also helps that the standard OpenBSD install can be done in roughly 10 minutes once you know what you're doing.
The trouble with online documentation...when you REALLY need the docs, it's usually because you've buggered something up and you can't go online. Online docs are no use if you can't read them. There is no subsitute for having a clear and concise manpage on the local disk!
I've found OpenBSD's documentation the best OSS docs I've found so far - I rarely have to go further than the manpage to figure something out. BSD's hardware support isn't horrible for servery/firewally things - I've not found any commonly used hardware (save Winmodems) that's not supported by OpenBSD.
If I hear the buzzword "blogosphere" once more, I think I'm going to vomit!
No, it's not good vapourware according to Bram Cohen. He picks several large holes in the white paper.
I'll give it you for slide printing, but printing from colour negatives is just awful. (I always found slide printing much easier, especially in getting a good colour balance, and Ilfochrome is superb).
India is a very large country. It has areas with severe weather, and areas without. It has geologically active areas and geologically inactive areas. You can't make that sort of generality.
It's like us in Europe saying we won't buy American stuff because there's earthquakes in California. If the widget you are buying is made in New Jersey, it's not important.