Note that the reverse trend is happening. Thanks to the very low cost of production and distribution, there are many, many, many alternate "shows" out there that you can watch.

Have you missed youtube entirely? What rock have you been hiding under? Also, the place with the most interesting display of documentaries and "non-primary" content is NetFlix. There is a *ridiculous* amount of youtube channels with interesting content.

For example, as a violinist, I like Taylor Davis' work immensely - she mixes violin and many of the themes to movies and games I've loved....

Remember when MTV was a close as you could get to stuff like this?

I see the exact opposite trend. Netflix is growing by gangbusters, but is the epitome of having many shows that "you aren't paying for". It's not a la carte... at all! You pay a flat rate of $8/month and stream whatever you like.

If you combine horrible customer service, high prices, and synchronized broadcasting, and you have unhappy customers switching to clearly better alternatives. "Paying for channels you don't use" is a symptom. The real problem is that they are horrible companies offering a previous generation, substandard service at ridiculous prices that have risen much faster than inflation.

You don't know Microsoft very well, then. They've literally never done anything else!

1) They were late to the party with DOS. They ripped off QDOS and sold it to IBM. It was IBM who launched Microsoft, it was Microsoft's non-exclusive contract with IBM that allowed the IBM compatible market to begin. That had never been done before, and only happened because IBM didn't take the microcomputer seriously.

2) They were late to the party for GUI. Windows was quickly thrown together after trying to work together with IBM and deciding to be dicks to IBM and steal lots of their design work.

3) Windows '95 was a rebrand of "Windows". So was Windows CE ME NT, XP, Vista, Mobile, and RT. In a sense, Windows 7 is the first "debranding" of Windows back to its marketing roots.

4) Microsoft goes through a major change in structure every 2-5 years. It's always made the tech rags, all the way back to the 1980s.

5) Their now dominant office was a rebrand of their MS Word, Excel, and Power Point, which were sold separately.

6) Each of these Office products was a late comer in its field, in part winning due to strange incompatibilities encountered by the "other guys". Remember the phrase "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run". Lotus 123 was the leading spreadsheet at the time.

and so on.... Just don't pretend that this BS is anything *new*. Market conditions were right, and MS had a combination of luck and determination to make the best of it. The market conditions have changed remarkably.

Scrubbing doesn't thrash your CPU as much as it thrashes I/O. Remember that both I/O and CPU are part of your "load average". This would be expected; it's reading every block on every device in your system.

You're right about the memory; I've forgotten that detail since RAM is cheap. 1 GB per TB is the recommended amount, though I've worked with far less in practice in low/medium write load environments.

There are so many pros for ZFS that I don't even. Until you try it, you won't "get it" - it's more like trying to describe purple to a life long blind guy. But, I'd adjust your list to at least include:

Pros:
- Data integrity
- Effortless handling of failure scenarios (RAIDZ makes normal RAID look like a child's crayon drawing)
- Snapshots.
- Replication. Imagine being able to DD a drive partition without taking it offline, and with perfect data integrity.
- Clones. Imagine being able to remount an rsync backup from last tuesday, and make changes to it, in seconds, without affecting your backup?
- Scrub. Do an fsck mid-day without affecting any end users. Not only "fix" errors, but actually guarantee the accuracy of the "fix" so that no data is lost or corrupted.
- Expandable. Add capacity at any time with no downtime. Replace every disk in your array with no downtime, and it can automatically use the extra space.
- Redundancy, even on a single device! Can't provide multiple disks, but want to defend against having a block failure corrupting your data?
- Flexible. Imagine having several partitions in your array, and be able to resize them at any time. In seconds. Or, don't bother to specify a size and have each partition use whatever space they need.
- Native compression. Double your disk space, while (sometimes) improving performance! We compressed our database backup filesystem and not only do we see some 70% reduction in disk space usage, we saw a net reduction in system load as IO overhead was significantly reduced.
- Sharp cost savings. ZFS obviates the need for exotic RAID hardware to do all the above. It brings back the "Inexpensive" in RAID. (Remember: "Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks"?)

Cons:
- CPU and RAM overhead comparable to Software RAID 5.
- Requires you to be competent and know how it operates, particularly when adding capacity to an existing pool.
- ECC RAM strongly recommended if using scrub.
- Strongly recommended for data partitions, YMMV for native O/S partitions. (EG: /)

FYI: The larger Geo Metro 1.3 liter engine produced 70 HP. Cars in the 3,000 lb range fit in the "mid sized sedan" range which typically have 150-225 horsepower.

Yes, it was under powered, but it was not a "Geo Metro".

I find it interesting your choice of cities... you must be North Cal

This is a bit like plugging a power strip into itself. It might seem self evident why that should work, but alas, it does not. /s

How do you think TOR communicates with the Internet at large, if not using the OS network stack? And if you coopt that stack, how, pray tell, do you expect TOR to be able to communicate with the TOR nodes?

I told you at least a hundred million times that math is just too hard to do!

I know a guy who is a network engineer at a regional ISP. They are ecstatic about hosting Netflix gear "for free" because of all the money they save! Despite the consensus here, bandwidth isn't free, it's a huge expense. And their largest use case is Netflix. By hosting the Netflix servers at the data center, they cut their network traffic by something like half.

It's a pretty big deal for them.

Revenue for a company on the way out frequently looks really rosy right up to the last bit. Take a look at Nokia which was making massive profits by not investing in smart phones. They had massive market share in "feature phones" that overwhelmingly outsold smart phones. That is, until they became so passe that even the kids didn't want one. Now the pieces are being sold off to... wait!

You know, I didn't even mean to pick Nokia because of its relationship with Microsoft, but it just occurred to me... Whelp!

Not all Linux fans. I'm a Linux fan. I recognize that it's not suitable for non-techie users. There is literally no focus on end user development - that's what I like about it!

It's sysadmin / developer oriented and I hope that never changes.

not to mention that he's doing it wrong: you put your hotel on Boardwalk first, since you get the most money AND the most likely landing there thanks to the "Advance token to boardwalk" cards.

But they aren't the best investment anyway; you'd do better putting your hotels on Orange, then Red/Yellow, then Light Blue...

Tsk, tsk....

We solved this problem once before - with fossil fuels. The answer is simply to have more capacity on hand than demand. We can do the exact same thing with alternative energy.

The difference is only that alternative energy doesn't have an "off" button, so we simply have to assume that, given a source of alternative energy, EG: a windmill, that we won't necessarily use all of its capacity. If we built gobs and gobs of windmills and solar panels, and installed them in such a way that not all their potential output is used all the time, we have a stable power grid.

The only difference is that the "off" button has to work differently. EG: a solar panel installation could dump unused power to a heating element or something. If power companies were smart enough to "get out in front" of this problem, they'd switch to the business of transporting power, which includes managing demand.

Unfortunately, power companies are run by myopic trolls, so I'm not expecting this business transition to go smoothly.

Poppycock.

While FTTN entails a fiber optic cable passed around public easements, coming to the home means setting up appointments for each home within the neighborhood. If it takes only 3x as much to do the houses too, I'd be surprised.

While the equipment involved might still be expensive, the cost of the personnel to install them is nothing to be trifled with.