No. If anything it's probably the fifteen beers my friends and I have before we start thinking about playing Goldeneye. I can pass the Seizure Robots test just fine:).
It's not only that. Regardless of whether you can come up with a better interface or not, the users are going to have their old habits to contend with. This means no matter how well your interface works it's going to seem weird to them for a little while.
Thus, if you really want to make an interface change, you need to design an interface that's just so vastly superior to the legacy interface that people will see it immediately. It's the only way you're going to get them to waste their time with the learning curve.
Automatic form fill - Saves you lots of time filling out the same info over and over again on a thousand different websites.
Location bar autocomplete - Not only does it speed up typing out those long URLs, it also serves as kind of a quick-and-dirty history menu.
Bookmark key words - My personal favorite. I love the ability to type "g monkeys" in the location bar and have Google search the web for monkeys. I have these things set up for everything: IMDb, CDDB, RFCs, dictionary.com, and probably two dozen more. Gives you the power of having fifty different search boxes, without cluttering up your interface. I won't even consider a browser that doesn't have this feature, though I think they all do now.
Mouse gestures - I don't use them very often because I prefer radial context menus, but I know people who can't live without them. Very cool.
FPS games (which get the majority of my time) almost require a keyboard and mouse to play properly. While games such as Goldeneye may be perfectly playable on a console for most people, purists like myself want to vomit at the lack of control. Likewise, the additional buttons on the keyboard and pointing precision of the mouse make them a much better choice for RPG and RTS games.
On the other hand, sports, fighting, and driving games are better suited to console controllers. This is especially true in that these sort of games are often best experienced with a buddy or two playing next to you. Sharing a keyboard with your opponent is just no fun, as players of earlier PC sports games will be glad to tell you.
A platform with both options is well on its way to the perfect game machine. A PC with a standardized control pad is rather close to an Xbox. Funny, that. Good move on Microsoft's part.
Because if they start capping Kazaa users and other heavy downloaders they'll just go get DSL. On the other hand, if they let your service fall into the toilet you'll just bitch on Slashdot. If I were a heartless corporation, what would I do?
(As an aside, I'm not ragging on you for bitching on Slashdot. Hell, I'm sure I've whined about my cable at least once in my comments here. It was just an honest observation.)
In between sunning myself and throwing back various fruity drinks in Jamaica (vacation, almost forgot what those are like), I spent a week trying to grok the cricket matches that seemed to be on all of the hotel's TV channels 24/7. I never really got it. Baseball is perfect for stupid Americans like me:).
Is it worth your time? Well, it's simple enough that in the time you spent thinking about why you never learned it the other day you probably could have gotten a good start on actually learning it.
So yeah, it's worth your time. Or, at least it was. Maybe it's not if you never think about it again. Of course, now you will. There is no spoon.
While I agree with you to the extent that most people won't waste their time trying to crack BeOS anymore, I don't think your argument extends to UNIX vs. Windows security nearly as well as you think.
Come on, if you're writing code for recognition purposes there's a lot more in it for you to get Theo de Raadt's goat by finding a rare OpenBSD hole than Bill G's by poking through the swiss cheese that is Windows.
And for "let's actually crack this box" purposes there's probably already a four month old exploit that the admin hasn't patched that you can use to break into a Windows box, so why waste your time writing a new one?
Now, politically I'm not a big fan of Microsoft; but some people are I suppose, and I figure that this isn't a philosophy question. I'll put that aside for the moment. Also, I'd probably gladly work there if I were still into looking for a tech job (not that they'd let me in, the competition sounds pretty tight). It sounds like a pretty sweet gig.
From a stability and performance standpoint on the desktop yes, newer versions of Windows are pretty damn good. I haven't had a BSOD that I couldn't trace back to a faulty device driver or bad hardware since before I started using NT4. Mozilla crashes with about the same frequency of IE (neither of which crashes very much). OpenOffice.org crashes a lot more than any version of office after Office95.
At the same time, from a security standpoint things are as bad as ever. Of all the machines on my network here, the only ones that have ever been compromised are the Windows boxes. All of them, at one point or another. I constantly worry about not exposing them to the outside world. I hit Windows Update at least once a week and my roommates usually do the same. In this regard we're much more careful than most Windows users, and we have the additional measure of hiding behind an OpenBSD NAT box. I'm at the point where I won't store any vital or private data on it.
I don't hate the Windows UI, though I'm much more comfortable in a UNIX environment. I like having a ton of high quality commercial software ready for me to install without jumping through a dozen hoops trying to get it working in Wine or having to resort to VMware. I like that all the games I want to play pretty much just work. In a lot of ways Windows is just fine, and in even more ways it's better than the free UNIX desktop alternatives (though the gap is slowly narrowing). What I can't stand is the fact that it's almost impossible for me to put any sort of trust in a box that runs Windows, no matter what I do.
Oh, and on the server it's just not even fucking close. I think pretty much everyone acknowledges that at this point, though.
You make a good point about the MacOS. Before OSX it was as bad as Windows95 on its worst day. Mac people are zealots that make the most rabid Linux supporters look like level-headed individuals, though, so they'd never complain within earshot of outsiders. Of course now they've got a desktop OS that the rest of the world wishes they had. Good for them. I'll rejoin them when I get a new job and can afford... things... again:).
I've felt the way you do for a long time. I've usually got the latest dev kernel on my laptop because of its requirement of a recent ACPI patch (it's one of those legacy-free Toshibas) to get sound and its NVIDIA video card (these two don't go together well), but for every other system I have I don't touch the kernel if I can get away with it.
In this day and age, when most common PC hardware, and certainly any PC hardware worth anything (ie. not the aforementioned laptop), is well-supported under Linux, why do people feel compelled to have the latest kernel? I compile all my kernels on my Athlon XP build machine and even when the compiles are pretty fast (compared to my old 486 box that I first used Linux on) it's not exactly *fun*.
I consider myself a pretty big geek, being thoroughly integrated into the Slashdot hive mind and all. I'm on top of CVS gaim, xine/totem, Mozilla, and GNOME (hoping it won't suck eventually) because they seem to become noticeably better by the day. But the kernel? Could someone please explain why?
Um. Saying "winblows" is t0t4lly k3wl d00d! I understand your dislike of Windows, but "winblows" makes you sound like a fucking tool.
Anyway, ATI's drivers are better now. If there are still problems with some old piece of hardware you're using, oh well. That's the breaks with a 6mo product cycle. Go get an original Radeon for like $20.
Most of your friends are in the minority. The general public (not engineering students, for the most part) signs on when they're at the computer then signs off or sets themselves away when they leave. I use AIM in much the same way you do, but I understand that there are a lot more of them than there are of me.
The application menu bar on the Mac is always in the same place, at the very top. This means that if you need to click the file menu in 500 different applications it's always going to be at the exact same spot on the screen. You can hit menus considerably faster and more precisely because of this.
On Windows (this applies to KDE and GNOME as well) the menu bar is at the top of the application window. It's in the same place relative to the application, but in a completely different place relative to the desktop. You are slowed down by having to "find" this location.
Not only that, but the clickable regions of the menu items on the Mac's menu bar extend to the very edge of the screen. As any usability guru will tell you, the fastest places on a screen to hit with a mouse are the four corners, followed by areas along the four edges. This is because no matter how quickly you move your mouse to the edge of the screen, there is no way to "overshoot" the edge with your cursor. So on a Mac, not only do you always know where the item you want is, it's very easy to hit with your mouse.
Windows, due to its menu placement, cannot take advantage of this for application menus. Unfortunately, it seems they don't take advantage of this even when they can. I'm banging this post out on a Windows XP laptop and if I drag the pointer down to the very bottom of the screen clicking does not activate the taskbar buttons immediately above the pointer. It seems you have to go down to the bottom and then up a pixel or two.
That's just one example, and there are many more. They don't sound like big deals, and if you think of them in terms of, "Oh wow, I have to move my mouse a whole two extra pixels. Boo hoo!" they aren't. But think how many times you need to hit an application's menubar in the course of the day. If Apple's UI is just *that* much better in a couple of high traffic areas, it can mean a potentially huge savings in time, effort, and frustration over the course of the user's lifetime.
Now to clarify something:
I don't hate the Windows interface. I think it has gotten a lot more intelligent since Windows 95 and I think XP works better than ever once you turn off all the goofy shit and make it look like a nicer version of Windows 2000. I just think the Mac UI works better. I'd still take either long before I'd take KDE or GNOME, though I'm really hoping that changes someday.
I also don't *personally* think the UI alone is worth me spending $3000+ on a Mac to be a close match for the PC I built for just over $1000. I spend most of my day in Mozilla, PuTTY, and gvim and interface with explorer mainly through shortcut keys and the Run dialog, so I rarely even need my mouse.
The only reason I wish I could afford a Mac is because I want a real UNIX desktop (you can argue that OS X isn't UNIX, but compared to Windows... close enough!) that has the "it just works" feel to it. As much as I like ripping boxes apart and putting them back together, and as much as I like FreeBSD-CURRENT, sometimes I just want stuff to work. The free UNIX desktop doesn't without feeling like a house of cards that's about to fall over.
I think the fact that people boo when Apple changes their interface is a testament to just how good it is. Computer interfaces may suck in general (as the usability gurus like to shout whenever they think someone is listening), but among them Apple stands tall as an example of things done right.
What's goofy is, the classic interface was great. The OS X interface is just as great if not better IMHO. Why can Apple get it right twice, when Microsoft is still trying to do it once?
By the way, this comes from someone who doesn't own a Mac anymore. Wish I could afford one again;).
Lazy HTML users? Most of the HTML hacks that "lazy" designers use are to get around browser incompatibilities so their clients' complex layouts look correct in all the browsers their customers might be using.
You think people who design for a living wouldn't love to be able to just use CSS for everything and avoid nested tables and spacer gifs? Being able to run their page through the w3's validator and being positive it will work? Most of them are on cloud 9 that they can avoid font tags for the most part nowadays.
Creating a simple page with CSS handling all the layout questions and having it just work everywhere is a dream that most designers want to realize. The current practice of creating a site and testing it in NN 4/6/7, IE 5(Win/Mac)/5.5/6, and perhaps Opera and Konq depending on the client's requirements, then adjusting for one browser's quirks and testing everything again is certainly not something designers enjoy. Unfortunately, the people who sign the checks don't so much care about clean HTML code as they do their pretty layout working in every browser they might use no matter how decrepit it is.
I use this. It has features that let you include/exclude certain content to target different people. If you needed more flexibility than that, you could always write your own XSL stylesheet.
In general AIM doesn't use hardly any bandwidth. Myself and my two roommates each have clients running 24/7 and traffic to and from AIM servers barely shows up in the statistics on our router.
However, one of my roommates has a sister that has recently discovered AIM's DirectIM feature. She seems to like it because she can see if the remote party is typing or not. That's nice, but these connections seem to use quite a large amount of bandwidth even when completely idle. I didn't get exact numbers, but I thought a file transfer of some kind was going on until I went and checked with my roommate. Needless to say, it was causing a measurable difference in latency on our cable modem (which is kind of shaky anyway) or I probably wouldn't have noticed in the first place.
Anyway, I added a pf rule blocking direct connections on the ports AIM uses from the network she's on at Auburn and haven't seen any problems since then. I don't know if this has anything to do with the claims this story is referring to, but I guess it could.
If you combine all the trickles of bandwidth you take for granted on an always-on connection it becomes apparent rather quickly that it's not very hard to exceed 1GB/day.
Right now I'm listening to Digitally Imported at 128kbps. Over a 24 hour period that will eat almost a gig and a half (granted, to be kind to their servers I turn it off when I'm AFK, but I'll still be listening to DI or SomaFM 8-10 hours a day most week days, and potentially much more if I'm on some sort of coding binge). Add in IRC (maybe on multiple networks if you're a junkie or have special interests that have their own IRC networks, ie. GamesNET or Freenode), IM (which can be three or four different sessions if you have friends on all the major networks, thank god for gaim/trillian), a SSH session or two that you leave open for convenience, and fetchmail checking your remote mail server every 10-20 minutes or so and you could be using most of your daily bandwidth allotment on things you're not even actively doing, but that just kind of get taken for granted in the background.
If you're a gamer, Half-Life (which has the stingiest netcode I know of in a game that's still heavily played) will typically use almost 200MB over a 24 hour period. I know some people who almost play it that much, too. Other, newer games easily use 2-3x that much, especially if you tip them off to the fact that you have a broadband connection.
Anyway, it's true that bandwidth isn't free, and I don't even think NTL is doing anything particularly wrong by imposing a cap. I kind of wish Comcast would do it, then maybe all these people who keep their connections pegged at the max all day with file sharing traffic (like my roommates before I asked them to stop) would calm down and I could have a decent connection outside of 3am-8am. My likely small additional usage would be worth a reasonable overage charge to me under these circumstances.
I do think all their subscribers should be given the opportunity to bail from any current contracts without penalty, though, since they signed up for "unlimited usage".
I think some of the newer episodes have gotten a bum rap they don't deserve just because most people think the show has passed its golden age. Some of the more recent ones I've really enjoyed (sorry, I don't keep up with episode titles):
The spring break ep. where they go to Florida. The waitress at the diner they hide out in is great. Also, in the non-syndicated version of the show the part where their car is stuck on the front of the train is a lot longer. Homer: "Why isn't my baby gaining weight?" Shrink: "Because it's made of plastic." Homer: "I see..." (I don't know why that exchange makes me laugh so hard, but it does)
The ep. with The Who and the changing area codes. Homer's got written on his hand "Lenny = White, Carl = Black" and he consults it before talking to them. Plus there's the whole exchange with the badger, which is sadly somewhat shortened in the syndicated version of the show but has to be one of the funnier moments on TV period. Phoney McRingRing: "You're not stupider than a monkey, are you?" Chief Wiggum: "Um.. how big of a monkey?"
Bart: "Dad, use the chlorophorm...!" Homer (to bodyguard): "I'll give you this bottle of chlorophorm if you take us to see The Who."
There have been a few other gems in the past couple years I can't recall at the moment. While it's true the show isn't the guaranteed winner that it used to be it's still far and away the best show on television. I'll be parked on the couch every Sunday evening for as long as they keep making it.
Slashdot Mirror
Just replace them both with a Beowulf cluster running Emacs. Be sure to buy a bigger hard disk first, though :).
No. If anything it's probably the fifteen beers my friends and I have before we start thinking about playing Goldeneye. I can pass the Seizure Robots test just fine :).
It's not only that. Regardless of whether you can come up with a better interface or not, the users are going to have their old habits to contend with. This means no matter how well your interface works it's going to seem weird to them for a little while.
Thus, if you really want to make an interface change, you need to design an interface that's just so vastly superior to the legacy interface that people will see it immediately. It's the only way you're going to get them to waste their time with the learning curve.
No, it's not just you.
FPS games (which get the majority of my time) almost require a keyboard and mouse to play properly. While games such as Goldeneye may be perfectly playable on a console for most people, purists like myself want to vomit at the lack of control. Likewise, the additional buttons on the keyboard and pointing precision of the mouse make them a much better choice for RPG and RTS games.
On the other hand, sports, fighting, and driving games are better suited to console controllers. This is especially true in that these sort of games are often best experienced with a buddy or two playing next to you. Sharing a keyboard with your opponent is just no fun, as players of earlier PC sports games will be glad to tell you.
A platform with both options is well on its way to the perfect game machine. A PC with a standardized control pad is rather close to an Xbox. Funny, that. Good move on Microsoft's part.
Well, it certainly makes baseball a hell of a lot better :P.
Because if they start capping Kazaa users and other heavy downloaders they'll just go get DSL. On the other hand, if they let your service fall into the toilet you'll just bitch on Slashdot. If I were a heartless corporation, what would I do?
(As an aside, I'm not ragging on you for bitching on Slashdot. Hell, I'm sure I've whined about my cable at least once in my comments here. It was just an honest observation.)
In between sunning myself and throwing back various fruity drinks in Jamaica (vacation, almost forgot what those are like), I spent a week trying to grok the cricket matches that seemed to be on all of the hotel's TV channels 24/7. I never really got it. Baseball is perfect for stupid Americans like me :).
Is it worth your time? Well, it's simple enough that in the time you spent thinking about why you never learned it the other day you probably could have gotten a good start on actually learning it.
So yeah, it's worth your time. Or, at least it was. Maybe it's not if you never think about it again. Of course, now you will. There is no spoon.
I'm putting those Wachowski brothers on double secret probation.
While I agree with you to the extent that most people won't waste their time trying to crack BeOS anymore, I don't think your argument extends to UNIX vs. Windows security nearly as well as you think.
Come on, if you're writing code for recognition purposes there's a lot more in it for you to get Theo de Raadt's goat by finding a rare OpenBSD hole than Bill G's by poking through the swiss cheese that is Windows.
And for "let's actually crack this box" purposes there's probably already a four month old exploit that the admin hasn't patched that you can use to break into a Windows box, so why waste your time writing a new one?
Now, politically I'm not a big fan of Microsoft; but some people are I suppose, and I figure that this isn't a philosophy question. I'll put that aside for the moment. Also, I'd probably gladly work there if I were still into looking for a tech job (not that they'd let me in, the competition sounds pretty tight). It sounds like a pretty sweet gig.
:).
From a stability and performance standpoint on the desktop yes, newer versions of Windows are pretty damn good. I haven't had a BSOD that I couldn't trace back to a faulty device driver or bad hardware since before I started using NT4. Mozilla crashes with about the same frequency of IE (neither of which crashes very much). OpenOffice.org crashes a lot more than any version of office after Office95.
At the same time, from a security standpoint things are as bad as ever. Of all the machines on my network here, the only ones that have ever been compromised are the Windows boxes. All of them, at one point or another. I constantly worry about not exposing them to the outside world. I hit Windows Update at least once a week and my roommates usually do the same. In this regard we're much more careful than most Windows users, and we have the additional measure of hiding behind an OpenBSD NAT box. I'm at the point where I won't store any vital or private data on it.
I don't hate the Windows UI, though I'm much more comfortable in a UNIX environment. I like having a ton of high quality commercial software ready for me to install without jumping through a dozen hoops trying to get it working in Wine or having to resort to VMware. I like that all the games I want to play pretty much just work. In a lot of ways Windows is just fine, and in even more ways it's better than the free UNIX desktop alternatives (though the gap is slowly narrowing). What I can't stand is the fact that it's almost impossible for me to put any sort of trust in a box that runs Windows, no matter what I do.
Oh, and on the server it's just not even fucking close. I think pretty much everyone acknowledges that at this point, though.
You make a good point about the MacOS. Before OSX it was as bad as Windows95 on its worst day. Mac people are zealots that make the most rabid Linux supporters look like level-headed individuals, though, so they'd never complain within earshot of outsiders. Of course now they've got a desktop OS that the rest of the world wishes they had. Good for them. I'll rejoin them when I get a new job and can afford... things... again
I'm going to show up to your high school reunion as Batman. We'll see how much action you get then, Mr. Smarty Pants.
I have a VW Jetta, like IMacs, and dislike Microsoft. Oh nooooo! I must be a hypocrite!
Die.
I've felt the way you do for a long time. I've usually got the latest dev kernel on my laptop because of its requirement of a recent ACPI patch (it's one of those legacy-free Toshibas) to get sound and its NVIDIA video card (these two don't go together well), but for every other system I have I don't touch the kernel if I can get away with it.
In this day and age, when most common PC hardware, and certainly any PC hardware worth anything (ie. not the aforementioned laptop), is well-supported under Linux, why do people feel compelled to have the latest kernel? I compile all my kernels on my Athlon XP build machine and even when the compiles are pretty fast (compared to my old 486 box that I first used Linux on) it's not exactly *fun*.
I consider myself a pretty big geek, being thoroughly integrated into the Slashdot hive mind and all. I'm on top of CVS gaim, xine/totem, Mozilla, and GNOME (hoping it won't suck eventually) because they seem to become noticeably better by the day. But the kernel? Could someone please explain why?
Um. Saying "winblows" is t0t4lly k3wl d00d! I understand your dislike of Windows, but "winblows" makes you sound like a fucking tool.
Anyway, ATI's drivers are better now. If there are still problems with some old piece of hardware you're using, oh well. That's the breaks with a 6mo product cycle. Go get an original Radeon for like $20.
You have a GF FX 5800 Ultra? What, did you need a space heater for the computer room or something? :)
Most of your friends are in the minority. The general public (not engineering students, for the most part) signs on when they're at the computer then signs off or sets themselves away when they leave. I use AIM in much the same way you do, but I understand that there are a lot more of them than there are of me.
Simple example:
The application menu bar on the Mac is always in the same place, at the very top. This means that if you need to click the file menu in 500 different applications it's always going to be at the exact same spot on the screen. You can hit menus considerably faster and more precisely because of this.
On Windows (this applies to KDE and GNOME as well) the menu bar is at the top of the application window. It's in the same place relative to the application, but in a completely different place relative to the desktop. You are slowed down by having to "find" this location.
Not only that, but the clickable regions of the menu items on the Mac's menu bar extend to the very edge of the screen. As any usability guru will tell you, the fastest places on a screen to hit with a mouse are the four corners, followed by areas along the four edges. This is because no matter how quickly you move your mouse to the edge of the screen, there is no way to "overshoot" the edge with your cursor. So on a Mac, not only do you always know where the item you want is, it's very easy to hit with your mouse.
Windows, due to its menu placement, cannot take advantage of this for application menus. Unfortunately, it seems they don't take advantage of this even when they can. I'm banging this post out on a Windows XP laptop and if I drag the pointer down to the very bottom of the screen clicking does not activate the taskbar buttons immediately above the pointer. It seems you have to go down to the bottom and then up a pixel or two.
That's just one example, and there are many more. They don't sound like big deals, and if you think of them in terms of, "Oh wow, I have to move my mouse a whole two extra pixels. Boo hoo!" they aren't. But think how many times you need to hit an application's menubar in the course of the day. If Apple's UI is just *that* much better in a couple of high traffic areas, it can mean a potentially huge savings in time, effort, and frustration over the course of the user's lifetime.
Now to clarify something:
I don't hate the Windows interface. I think it has gotten a lot more intelligent since Windows 95 and I think XP works better than ever once you turn off all the goofy shit and make it look like a nicer version of Windows 2000. I just think the Mac UI works better. I'd still take either long before I'd take KDE or GNOME, though I'm really hoping that changes someday.
I also don't *personally* think the UI alone is worth me spending $3000+ on a Mac to be a close match for the PC I built for just over $1000. I spend most of my day in Mozilla, PuTTY, and gvim and interface with explorer mainly through shortcut keys and the Run dialog, so I rarely even need my mouse.
The only reason I wish I could afford a Mac is because I want a real UNIX desktop (you can argue that OS X isn't UNIX, but compared to Windows... close enough!) that has the "it just works" feel to it. As much as I like ripping boxes apart and putting them back together, and as much as I like FreeBSD-CURRENT, sometimes I just want stuff to work. The free UNIX desktop doesn't without feeling like a house of cards that's about to fall over.
I think the fact that people boo when Apple changes their interface is a testament to just how good it is. Computer interfaces may suck in general (as the usability gurus like to shout whenever they think someone is listening), but among them Apple stands tall as an example of things done right.
;).
What's goofy is, the classic interface was great. The OS X interface is just as great if not better IMHO. Why can Apple get it right twice, when Microsoft is still trying to do it once?
By the way, this comes from someone who doesn't own a Mac anymore. Wish I could afford one again
Perhaps IHBT, but oh well.
Lazy HTML users? Most of the HTML hacks that "lazy" designers use are to get around browser incompatibilities so their clients' complex layouts look correct in all the browsers their customers might be using.
You think people who design for a living wouldn't love to be able to just use CSS for everything and avoid nested tables and spacer gifs? Being able to run their page through the w3's validator and being positive it will work? Most of them are on cloud 9 that they can avoid font tags for the most part nowadays.
Creating a simple page with CSS handling all the layout questions and having it just work everywhere is a dream that most designers want to realize. The current practice of creating a site and testing it in NN 4/6/7, IE 5(Win/Mac)/5.5/6, and perhaps Opera and Konq depending on the client's requirements, then adjusting for one browser's quirks and testing everything again is certainly not something designers enjoy. Unfortunately, the people who sign the checks don't so much care about clean HTML code as they do their pretty layout working in every browser they might use no matter how decrepit it is.
I use this. It has features that let you include/exclude certain content to target different people. If you needed more flexibility than that, you could always write your own XSL stylesheet.
In general AIM doesn't use hardly any bandwidth. Myself and my two roommates each have clients running 24/7 and traffic to and from AIM servers barely shows up in the statistics on our router.
However, one of my roommates has a sister that has recently discovered AIM's DirectIM feature. She seems to like it because she can see if the remote party is typing or not. That's nice, but these connections seem to use quite a large amount of bandwidth even when completely idle. I didn't get exact numbers, but I thought a file transfer of some kind was going on until I went and checked with my roommate. Needless to say, it was causing a measurable difference in latency on our cable modem (which is kind of shaky anyway) or I probably wouldn't have noticed in the first place.
Anyway, I added a pf rule blocking direct connections on the ports AIM uses from the network she's on at Auburn and haven't seen any problems since then. I don't know if this has anything to do with the claims this story is referring to, but I guess it could.
If you combine all the trickles of bandwidth you take for granted on an always-on connection it becomes apparent rather quickly that it's not very hard to exceed 1GB/day.
Right now I'm listening to Digitally Imported at 128kbps. Over a 24 hour period that will eat almost a gig and a half (granted, to be kind to their servers I turn it off when I'm AFK, but I'll still be listening to DI or SomaFM 8-10 hours a day most week days, and potentially much more if I'm on some sort of coding binge). Add in IRC (maybe on multiple networks if you're a junkie or have special interests that have their own IRC networks, ie. GamesNET or Freenode), IM (which can be three or four different sessions if you have friends on all the major networks, thank god for gaim/trillian), a SSH session or two that you leave open for convenience, and fetchmail checking your remote mail server every 10-20 minutes or so and you could be using most of your daily bandwidth allotment on things you're not even actively doing, but that just kind of get taken for granted in the background.
If you're a gamer, Half-Life (which has the stingiest netcode I know of in a game that's still heavily played) will typically use almost 200MB over a 24 hour period. I know some people who almost play it that much, too. Other, newer games easily use 2-3x that much, especially if you tip them off to the fact that you have a broadband connection.
Anyway, it's true that bandwidth isn't free, and I don't even think NTL is doing anything particularly wrong by imposing a cap. I kind of wish Comcast would do it, then maybe all these people who keep their connections pegged at the max all day with file sharing traffic (like my roommates before I asked them to stop) would calm down and I could have a decent connection outside of 3am-8am. My likely small additional usage would be worth a reasonable overage charge to me under these circumstances.
I do think all their subscribers should be given the opportunity to bail from any current contracts without penalty, though, since they signed up for "unlimited usage".
I think some of the newer episodes have gotten a bum rap they don't deserve just because most people think the show has passed its golden age. Some of the more recent ones I've really enjoyed (sorry, I don't keep up with episode titles):
The spring break ep. where they go to Florida. The waitress at the diner they hide out in is great. Also, in the non-syndicated version of the show the part where their car is stuck on the front of the train is a lot longer.
Homer: "Why isn't my baby gaining weight?"
Shrink: "Because it's made of plastic."
Homer: "I see..."
(I don't know why that exchange makes me laugh so hard, but it does)
The ep. with The Who and the changing area codes. Homer's got written on his hand "Lenny = White, Carl = Black" and he consults it before talking to them. Plus there's the whole exchange with the badger, which is sadly somewhat shortened in the syndicated version of the show but has to be one of the funnier moments on TV period.
Phoney McRingRing: "You're not stupider than a monkey, are you?"
Chief Wiggum: "Um.. how big of a monkey?"
Bart: "Dad, use the chlorophorm...!"
Homer (to bodyguard): "I'll give you this bottle of chlorophorm if you take us to see The Who."
There have been a few other gems in the past couple years I can't recall at the moment. While it's true the show isn't the guaranteed winner that it used to be it's still far and away the best show on television. I'll be parked on the couch every Sunday evening for as long as they keep making it.