Nah, I've had a bunch of packages. I had the full basic-extended with HBO, ShowTime and so on. The only extra stuff I watched would be if something interesting was on National Geographic or something like Dune or Children of Dune. I tried out the digital cable and nothing really compelled me to watch their either. $360/yr was a lot of money to watch a few extra shows. The $720/yr for digital was way too much. I dropped to basic cable so I can keep my cable modem.
I have too many other things I enjoy doing and TV cuts in to the free time that I could use for it. I go to the gym a few days a week. I practice guitar every night. I've rediscovered graphical/demo programming and there's always a book I want to read. I'm not very good at passive entertainment.
That's only true if they stop offering bundles. It would save a lot of money for people like me though. I get basic cable because it's the only way I can get a cable modem. Beyond the basic cable it'd be nice if I could get the Sci-Fi channel and the National Geographic channel as long as I have to have it. If I want to get those now I have to shell out another 30 bucks per month because I get 50 or so other channels that I'll never watch. So if for 21 or 27 bucks per month instead of 15 I could get 2 extra channels it'd be a big win for me.
I don't know how this would work though. My cable company offers probably around 100 channels but they're arranged in tiers. Up to 14 or something is basic, up to 70 is expanded basic and above that there are the various movie channels.
So with a handful of analog filters they can cut out what isn't purchased on a per customer basis.
If ala carte is forced then they'll have to have bandpass filters that are only 1 channel wide and a mixer so that a few of these filters can be run in parallel and then combined for delivery to the customer.It'd be easier for digital cable though.
Your example is busted. If I go into a Mexican restaurant I can order a special which has 3 items. It's a bit cheaper than ordering each item individually but it's not one third the price. If I know I'm not going to eat three enchilada's I can order 1. Yes, it will be a bit more expensive per enchilada than if I order the special. It'll be less expensive per enchilada I actually eat though.
have always been the masters of irreverence. The silly and sometimes seemingly lame sketches have always just been a veneer over them thumbing their noses at God, Queen and Country, bureaucracy, castes and whatever else they thought deserved a bit of a dressing down. Satire was their means of writing an indignant letter to the editor.
I know in Canada This Hour has 22 Minutes fills a similar role, what American comedy troups or performers do this in the U.S.?
FrameMaker still beats any other word processor-like application for large document production. I'm part of an engineering organization and we've looked at moving from FrameMaker but nothing else replaces it without the loss of a lot of functionality. A bunch of people could colaborate on a document, pull it together and publish it. We're engineers, not typesetters so while InDesign could do it (I'm sure anyway) we're not about to learn a new package just for this purpose.
We've played with OpenOffice templates but there doesn't seem to be a real way to handle pulling together a document. TeX can do it but it would have a steep learning curve for something that isn't our primary purpose. I know TeX myself but I'm not about to be the one who gets tapped to teach it to everybody else (all the while still working hard at doing solid engineering work)
FrameMaker was painful in some ways, mostly because it wasn't "Just a word processor". Once that aspect was realized it was fairly painless however.
I don't take gadgets with me when I am hiking but I don't have a problem with people who do (just as long as they're quiet). Everything becomes more technical as time passes. The hiking boots I wear now have a lot more engineering in tham than my old Zamberlan Alpine Lite's did (though I would gladly trade them for a pair - unfortunately I couldn't find any). My internal frame backpack, even though it's 12 years old now, is still a lot higher tech than my uncle's backpack from the early 1970's.
Would I go hiking with 20 year old technology? Twenty years ago I sure as Hell would have but if I have access to more modern technology now (that doesn't detract from the experience) I will make use of it on any present day hikes.
I thought at the end of the skit the guy they were fawning over came in with an ancient phonebooked size cellphone and changed the trend. I could be remembering wrong though, I mostly remember thinking the skit shouldn't have happened.
At 2X the price and 6X the volume the only way it'll be an iPod killer is if you use it like a brick to smash an iPod. This sounds like the Saturday Night Live skit where the hipper you were the bigger your cellphone was.
You're only going to ever legitimize some percentage of the population. Before p2p there were people who'd make a physical copy of a CD after borrowing from their friends. Before that there were people who'd tape copies of albums or even broadcasts off the air. I'm sure there were people who listened to music that they didn't pay for even before that but it's before my time.
Peer to peer filesharing would appear to make the percentage of people who've paid up decrease substantially but I'm not entirely sure it's true. I can only explain my own observations but take what you want out of them.
When I was a teenager there were several good local stations that played music in the genre that I enjoyed. Within that genre they played music from a wide variety of bands, some really succesful and some not so succesful. I listened to the radio every chance I could. I listened to it between classes on my walkman, in my friends cars on the way to school, on ghetto blasters during shop classes and at home on my stereo. The amazing thing was that despite that amount of exposure you'd always hear something new and wouldn't hear a lot of repeats. In fact the local stations made a big deal about no repeats (I lived near Detroit: WRIF, WLLZ and later WCSX were the stations I listened to). Based on what I heard and what I liked I bought a lot of albums and later compact discs. I still love music as much as I ever did, maybe more, I've widened the types of music I enjoy. I can't find a radio station that doesn't rely on a playlist of 20 to 40 songs with the occasional diversion from the playlist. Even though there's a couple of local stations that I find tolerable I'm not induced into buying a lot of albums. Why? They don't play a lot of songs. The time between repeats is down to at most a couple of hours and I'm not interested enough to buy every album I hear a track from. The radio stations format no longer acts like a drug dealer: "The first hits free, but if you want more then you've got to buy the album." Instead they play the same tunes over and over until quite frankly I'm sick of even the ones I once enjoyed.
I feel that P2P networks should become the new radio. If you log into a P2P network you can only search for stuff you already know about. Somebody needs to get the idea of letting people putting together setlists of songs that form virtual radio stations. Most music I do purchase now is from people telling me to give something a listen. P2P with some added infrastructure is perfect for that. Out of the chaos there would grow a handful of excellent stations that cover a variety of genres. These would be the ones that most people tune into, at least the ones that really like music as opposed to people who really like being trendy. This would rebuild something that fulfills radios old purpose: Exposing bands to people.
Some people would just snarf up entire catalogs via p2p and not pay for it, but people have always done this, the only thing that has changed is the technology. But if you're exposed in a meaningful way to more people then you'll sell more albums.Live365.com is close to what I'm talking about but isn't P2P.
This doesn't mean you'll be succesful. Being an artist doesn't guarantee your success just like earning a degree or learning a skill doesn't guarantee you'll get paid. The term starving artist has been around a lot longer than P2P networks.
I personally pay for everything I listen to. I have downloaded stuff off of p2p to get a feel for it and not paid for it but then I'm not listening to it. I decided I didn't like it and deleted it or lost track of it.
You could tax everybody but I would not be at all shocked if the average artist ended up getting less money. I know that if I had to pay a tax on blank media and such I would take it as a sign that I'm entitled to fill it up with whatever I want. So the average artist would have to rely on the good will of the industry to dole out their fair share of the taxes.
I think it turns it back into a game for a lot of people. After a while a lot of the power players don't take any more risks because their character might be killed. If you know that in X days everythings going to be purged anyway you go back to taking risks with your character and actually having fun rather than repeating the same tried-and-true killing loop to maximize your experience rate.
DirectX is Microsoft proprietary and Carmack has always stated that proprietary isn't a good thing. It's easier to port a game if it's built from the ground up for portability. I don't know what he's developing on now but in the past he hasn't always even done initial development on Windows.
PCI-X is 64 bits wide, keeping the phase relationship between the data bits and clocks is challenging - and you have to do it. There's no 1-bit wide PCI-X.
PCI express is a serial link, but if you need to you can gang together a couple of serial links for better aggregate bandwidth. Keeping two or four links with the proper relationship is much easier than keeping 32 or 64.
PCI express would have most of the difficult work done inside of the PCI express core. The serializer/deserializer will be painful but you only design it once and replicate it after that. The core of the chip still operates in parallel. So data leaving the core will have to be serialized, transmitted across the channel and received by a deserializer which translates the serial data back to parallel.
There are a lot of areas to introduce skew in parallel data. There's skew on the ASIC, skew on the PC board and skew in the cable. In addition parallel data going across a cable tends to capacitively couple at both the near and far end. There is also jitter from the PLL, on chip voltage variation etc.
If you crunch the numbers it should come in as a slightly better timing budget with a serial link at the data rates than you would have with a parallel link.
OK, I will agree: that particular judgement sucks. This is the first I'd heard of that case and I'm amazed that it ended so badly. Computer services have nothing to do with automobile manufacturing so it shouldn't be possible to claim trademark violation.
He also didn't win either. He just didn't lose. Microsoft decided that a little positive PR in the forms of giving him an X-Box, a trip and a number of other things was better than fighting it out in court.
Mike Rowe also had in his favour the fact that it was actually his name and that he wasn't competing against Microsoft. He still didn't win the case however, Microsoft bribed him with trinkets and got good PR plus the domain in return.
If I start an automobile company and call it Missan I wouldn't be too shocked if Nissan's legal department didn't come and pay me a visit.
Every single person who has every died has taken in nutrients. Therefore there's a 100% correlation between nutrition and fatality. The correlation is accurate but there's still no causality. Sometimes if you abuse statistics properly they're not even wrong.
I don't have PhotoShop CS, if somebody does could they try the following and see if it'll work?
1) invert the colours of the image and try to manipulate it with PhotoShop. 2) invert the orientation of the image. 3) remap the colours prior to PhotoShop then map them back within PhotoShop.
It's not that I really care about photoshopping money, but I'm curious about how well their security works.
I don't know why this would affect their stance on Quicktime for Linux. From Apple's perspective they're looking at an expenditure of engineering resources and marketing resources to gain a slice of 5% more market share for a product that they don't really make money on. Apple itself has already said that they won't make significant money on the iTunes music store itself after paying for bandwidth and the cut for the record companies. They might sell a few more iPods but a significant portion of that 5% dual boot into Windows anyway. If they want an iPod they could've already bought one since they support MP3 anyway.
I'd like to see Quicktime for Linux, I just don't see a business case for Apple where they make more than their expenditures.
No, there needs to be a compromise. Apple doesn't give a rats ass about a secure trusted client, iTunes and iPods supported and still support mp3 way before iTunes and copy protection was around. What they do care about is being able to legally sell songs online. To get the labels on board they have to make an honest attempt at copy protection, which they did. They also have to try and balance consumer rights, which they also did.
Of course depending on your point of view it might not seem like it. The record companies probably feel that there should be no way to rip the secure content to MP3 or burn it to CD. Some consumers probably feel that only making 10 CD copies (or whatever it is) of a purchased playlist is a huge burden.
So it's a technical contest. Apple secures things, hackers unsecure things. Eventually if the RIAA companies see the light they'll realize that the money spent on securing things is really just being pissed away and things will change.
but two that I've purchased, even after downloading them off the net, are Fallout and Fallout 2. I've even gladly purchased them two times: First under Windows, the second time under MacOS 9. I'll probably repurchase them under MacOS X as well. I purchased Fallout Tactics and frankly wish I would've pirated it. I played it for an hour or two and tossed it in my drawer never to be played again.
Both of these games were dated concepts at their time of release. First person shooters were already out so to a lot of people isometric 3D looked like something you'd expect out of a shareware title. Anybody who feels that way is missing out though. The graphics were excellent for what the game was about. They created a richly detailed world which was compelling and consistent. The game itself was unique in the combination of humour, storyline and almost tongue in cheek violence and situations. So it wasn't really about the gore and focusing on it and bragging about twitching bodies in something that's been watered down to a team shooter just shows that somebody didn't get it.
The two cardinal games were almost like good B movies and I think had a B-movie cult-like following to them. Sort of like Army of Darkness. It appeals strongly to a certain group of people. If I showed it to a lot of people I know they'd hate it.
They're not cheaper than CDs but they are cheaper than videotapes were when they were introduced. CDs were introduced at a higher cost than the LPs they replaced. From a $/byte standpoint DVDs are much less expensive than a CD as well, by about a factor of 10 based on non-sale prices. An interesting thing is also the price for rental copies. The last I checked the cost to rental outfits was the same as the price to consumers whereas a video tape could be 5 to 10 times the price of the consumer version.
I don't think they're easier to get, either one seems to be pretty trivial at least in the U.S.
Make sure that you can trust the person who's offering the bandwidth. Beyond that it'd be even better if you have somebody who lives near by who can physically pull the plug if need be or rescue any hardware. I took up a free hosting offer. My equipment and code was stolen (by the Chris Kuivenhoven mentioned in my.sig)
Slashdot Mirror
Nah, I've had a bunch of packages. I had the full basic-extended with HBO, ShowTime and so on. The only extra stuff I watched would be if something interesting was on National Geographic or something like Dune or Children of Dune. I tried out the digital cable and nothing really compelled me to watch their either. $360/yr was a lot of money to watch a few extra shows. The $720/yr for digital was way too much. I dropped to basic cable so I can keep my cable modem.
I have too many other things I enjoy doing and TV cuts in to the free time that I could use for it. I go to the gym a few days a week. I practice guitar every night. I've rediscovered graphical/demo programming and there's always a book I want to read. I'm not very good at passive entertainment.
That's only true if they stop offering bundles. It would save a lot of money for people like me though. I get basic cable because it's the only way I can get a cable modem. Beyond the basic cable it'd be nice if I could get the Sci-Fi channel and the National Geographic channel as long as I have to have it. If I want to get those now I have to shell out another 30 bucks per month because I get 50 or so other channels that I'll never watch. So if for 21 or 27 bucks per month instead of 15 I could get 2 extra channels it'd be a big win for me.
I don't know how this would work though. My cable company offers probably around 100 channels but they're arranged in tiers. Up to 14 or something is basic, up to 70 is expanded basic and above that there are the various movie channels.
So with a handful of analog filters they can cut out what isn't purchased on a per customer basis.
If ala carte is forced then they'll have to have bandpass filters that are only 1 channel wide and a mixer so that a few of these filters can be run in parallel and then combined for delivery to the customer.It'd be easier for digital cable though.
Your example is busted. If I go into a Mexican restaurant I can order a special which has 3 items. It's a bit cheaper than ordering each item individually but it's not one third the price. If I know I'm not going to eat three enchilada's I can order 1. Yes, it will be a bit more expensive per enchilada than if I order the special. It'll be less expensive per enchilada I actually eat though.
have always been the masters of irreverence. The silly and sometimes seemingly lame sketches have always just been a veneer over them thumbing their noses at God, Queen and Country, bureaucracy, castes and whatever else they thought deserved a bit of a dressing down. Satire was their means of writing an indignant letter to the editor.
I know in Canada This Hour has 22 Minutes fills a similar role, what American comedy troups or performers do this in the U.S.?
FrameMaker still beats any other word processor-like application for large document production. I'm part of an engineering organization and we've looked at moving from FrameMaker but nothing else replaces it without the loss of a lot of functionality. A bunch of people could colaborate on a document, pull it together and publish it. We're engineers, not typesetters so while InDesign could do it (I'm sure anyway) we're not about to learn a new package just for this purpose.
We've played with OpenOffice templates but there doesn't seem to be a real way to handle pulling together a document. TeX can do it but it would have a steep learning curve for something that isn't our primary purpose. I know TeX myself but I'm not about to be the one who gets tapped to teach it to everybody else (all the while still working hard at doing solid engineering work)
FrameMaker was painful in some ways, mostly because it wasn't "Just a word processor". Once that aspect was realized it was fairly painless however.
I don't take gadgets with me when I am hiking but I don't have a problem with people who do (just as long as they're quiet). Everything becomes more technical as time passes. The hiking boots I wear now have a lot more engineering in tham than my old Zamberlan Alpine Lite's did (though I would gladly trade them for a pair - unfortunately I couldn't find any). My internal frame backpack, even though it's 12 years old now, is still a lot higher tech than my uncle's backpack from the early 1970's.
Would I go hiking with 20 year old technology? Twenty years ago I sure as Hell would have but if I have access to more modern technology now (that doesn't detract from the experience) I will make use of it on any present day hikes.
I thought at the end of the skit the guy they were fawning over came in with an ancient phonebooked size cellphone and changed the trend. I could be remembering wrong though, I mostly remember thinking the skit shouldn't have happened.
At 2X the price and 6X the volume the only way it'll be an iPod killer is if you use it like a brick to smash an iPod. This sounds like the Saturday Night Live skit where the hipper you were the bigger your cellphone was.
You're only going to ever legitimize some percentage of the population. Before p2p there were people who'd make a physical copy of a CD after borrowing from their friends. Before that there were people who'd tape copies of albums or even broadcasts off the air. I'm sure there were people who listened to music that they didn't pay for even before that but it's before my time.
Peer to peer filesharing would appear to make the percentage of people who've paid up decrease substantially but I'm not entirely sure it's true. I can only explain my own observations but take what you want out of them.
When I was a teenager there were several good local stations that played music in the genre that I enjoyed. Within that genre they played music from a wide variety of bands, some really succesful and some not so succesful. I listened to the radio every chance I could. I listened to it between classes on my walkman, in my friends cars on the way to school, on ghetto blasters during shop classes and at home on my stereo. The amazing thing was that despite that amount of exposure you'd always hear something new and wouldn't hear a lot of repeats. In fact the local stations made a big deal about no repeats (I lived near Detroit: WRIF, WLLZ and later WCSX were the stations I listened to). Based on what I heard and what I liked I bought a lot of albums and later compact discs. I still love music as much as I ever did, maybe more, I've widened the types of music I enjoy. I can't find a radio station that doesn't rely on a playlist of 20 to 40 songs with the occasional diversion from the playlist. Even though there's a couple of local stations that I find tolerable I'm not induced into buying a lot of albums. Why? They don't play a lot of songs. The time between repeats is down to at most a couple of hours and I'm not interested enough to buy every album I hear a track from. The radio stations format no longer acts like a drug dealer: "The first hits free, but if you want more then you've got to buy the album." Instead they play the same tunes over and over until quite frankly I'm sick of even the ones I once enjoyed.
I feel that P2P networks should become the new radio. If you log into a P2P network you can only search for stuff you already know about. Somebody needs to get the idea of letting people putting together setlists of songs that form virtual radio stations. Most music I do purchase now is from people telling me to give something a listen. P2P with some added infrastructure is perfect for that. Out of the chaos there would grow a handful of excellent stations that cover a variety of genres. These would be the ones that most people tune into, at least the ones that really like music as opposed to people who really like being trendy. This would rebuild something that fulfills radios old purpose: Exposing bands to people.
Some people would just snarf up entire catalogs via p2p and not pay for it, but people have always done this, the only thing that has changed is the technology. But if you're exposed in a meaningful way to more people then you'll sell more albums.Live365.com is close to what I'm talking about but isn't P2P.
This doesn't mean you'll be succesful. Being an artist doesn't guarantee your success just like earning a degree or learning a skill doesn't guarantee you'll get paid. The term starving artist has been around a lot longer than P2P networks.
I personally pay for everything I listen to. I have downloaded stuff off of p2p to get a feel for it and not paid for it but then I'm not listening to it. I decided I didn't like it and deleted it or lost track of it.
You could tax everybody but I would not be at all shocked if the average artist ended up getting less money. I know that if I had to pay a tax on blank media and such I would take it as a sign that I'm entitled to fill it up with whatever I want. So the average artist would have to rely on the good will of the industry to dole out their fair share of the taxes.
Slashdot moderators too busy playing games to read their own site. Repost a 11
I think it turns it back into a game for a lot of people. After a while a lot of the power players don't take any more risks because their character might be killed. If you know that in X days everythings going to be purged anyway you go back to taking risks with your character and actually having fun rather than repeating the same tried-and-true killing loop to maximize your experience rate.
DirectX is Microsoft proprietary and Carmack has always stated that proprietary isn't a good thing. It's easier to port a game if it's built from the ground up for portability. I don't know what he's developing on now but in the past he hasn't always even done initial development on Windows.
PCI-X is 64 bits wide, keeping the phase relationship between the data bits and clocks is challenging - and you have to do it. There's no 1-bit wide PCI-X.
PCI express is a serial link, but if you need to you can gang together a couple of serial links for better aggregate bandwidth. Keeping two or four links with the proper relationship is much easier than keeping 32 or 64.
PCI express would have most of the difficult work done inside of the PCI express core. The serializer/deserializer will be painful but you only design it once and replicate it after that. The core of the chip still operates in parallel. So data leaving the core will have to be serialized, transmitted across the channel and received by a deserializer which translates the serial data back to parallel.
There are a lot of areas to introduce skew in parallel data. There's skew on the ASIC, skew on the PC board and skew in the cable. In addition parallel data going across a cable tends to capacitively couple at both the near and far end. There is also jitter from the PLL, on chip voltage variation etc.
If you crunch the numbers it should come in as a slightly better timing budget with a serial link at the data rates than you would have with a parallel link.
OK, I will agree: that particular judgement sucks. This is the first I'd heard of that case and I'm amazed that it ended so badly. Computer services have nothing to do with automobile manufacturing so it shouldn't be possible to claim trademark violation.
BS to you too.
He also didn't win either. He just didn't lose. Microsoft decided that a little positive PR in the forms of giving him an X-Box, a trip and a number of other things was better than fighting it out in court.
Mike Rowe also had in his favour the fact that it was actually his name and that he wasn't competing against Microsoft. He still didn't win the case however, Microsoft bribed him with trinkets and got good PR plus the domain in return.
If I start an automobile company and call it Missan I wouldn't be too shocked if Nissan's legal department didn't come and pay me a visit.
MikeRoweSoft didn't sell a competing operating system, competing office product or even a competing implementation of Minesweeper.
Yeah, that's your fault though. Wheel, gear, lever and inclined plane. Where's the recent inventions? ;)
Every single person who has every died has taken in nutrients. Therefore there's a 100% correlation between nutrition and fatality. The correlation is accurate but there's still no causality. Sometimes if you abuse statistics properly they're not even wrong.
You don't change the wavelength of the light, you just absorb the wavelengths which don't make up green.
I don't have PhotoShop CS, if somebody does could they try the following and see if it'll work?
1) invert the colours of the image and try to manipulate it with PhotoShop.
2) invert the orientation of the image.
3) remap the colours prior to PhotoShop then map them back within PhotoShop.
It's not that I really care about photoshopping money, but I'm curious about how well their security works.
I don't know why this would affect their stance on Quicktime for Linux. From Apple's perspective they're looking at an expenditure of engineering resources and marketing resources to gain a slice of 5% more market share for a product that they don't really make money on. Apple itself has already said that they won't make significant money on the iTunes music store itself after paying for bandwidth and the cut for the record companies. They might sell a few more iPods but a significant portion of that 5% dual boot into Windows anyway. If they want an iPod they could've already bought one since they support MP3 anyway.
I'd like to see Quicktime for Linux, I just don't see a business case for Apple where they make more than their expenditures.
No, there needs to be a compromise. Apple doesn't give a rats ass about a secure trusted client, iTunes and iPods supported and still support mp3 way before iTunes and copy protection was around. What they do care about is being able to legally sell songs online. To get the labels on board they have to make an honest attempt at copy protection, which they did. They also have to try and balance consumer rights, which they also did.
Of course depending on your point of view it might not seem like it. The record companies probably feel that there should be no way to rip the secure content to MP3 or burn it to CD. Some consumers probably feel that only making 10 CD copies (or whatever it is) of a purchased playlist is a huge burden.
So it's a technical contest. Apple secures things, hackers unsecure things. Eventually if the RIAA companies see the light they'll realize that the money spent on securing things is really just being pissed away and things will change.
but two that I've purchased, even after downloading them off the net, are Fallout and Fallout 2. I've even gladly purchased them two times: First under Windows, the second time under MacOS 9. I'll probably repurchase them under MacOS X as well. I purchased Fallout Tactics and frankly wish I would've pirated it. I played it for an hour or two and tossed it in my drawer never to be played again.
Both of these games were dated concepts at their time of release. First person shooters were already out so to a lot of people isometric 3D looked like something you'd expect out of a shareware title. Anybody who feels that way is missing out though. The graphics were excellent for what the game was about. They created a richly detailed world which was compelling and consistent. The game itself was unique in the combination of humour, storyline and almost tongue in cheek violence and situations. So it wasn't really about the gore and focusing on it and bragging about twitching bodies in something that's been watered down to a team shooter just shows that somebody didn't get it.
The two cardinal games were almost like good B movies and I think had a B-movie cult-like following to them. Sort of like Army of Darkness. It appeals strongly to a certain group of people. If I showed it to a lot of people I know they'd hate it.
They're not cheaper than CDs but they are cheaper than videotapes were when they were introduced. CDs were introduced at a higher cost than the LPs they replaced. From a $/byte standpoint DVDs are much less expensive than a CD as well, by about a factor of 10 based on non-sale prices. An interesting thing is also the price for rental copies. The last I checked the cost to rental outfits was the same as the price to consumers whereas a video tape could be 5 to 10 times the price of the consumer version.
I don't think they're easier to get, either one seems to be pretty trivial at least in the U.S.
Make sure that you can trust the person who's offering the bandwidth. Beyond that it'd be even better if you have somebody who lives near by who can physically pull the plug if need be or rescue any hardware. I took up a free hosting offer. My equipment and code was stolen (by the Chris Kuivenhoven mentioned in my .sig)