Not if you move to one of these less than 30 symmetrical Fiber To The Home (FTTH) communities, check out the map!

So when moving, know you have options and move to an area that will give you FTTH internet freedom.

Prosperity and jobs are already flowing to these cities.

I agree that anyone with a house paid off and a job in their area is not going to move. However, that same person, with a house paid off, but no job, better move or have investments paying a livable wage or the property taxes will eventually cost their heirs the home.

Those looking for a job, should seriously consider making the jump to a Symmetrical FTTH community sooner rather than later.

Of course you can always get DSL, dd-WRT on a supported firewall/router, has shown me that unthrottled DSL is faster than over 80% of throttled cable service. Remember, 100% of cable internet service is throttled, its only a matter of how much, not if. In a few areas where symmetrical FTTH competition exists and the oligopoly has not been able to pass legislation (see red states especially) at the state level to prevent competition, they actually throttle less than normal, thus only there is Cable internet faster than DSL.

If you are shopping for internet access and can not get symmetrical FTTH, than go DSL for Internet. If you want cable for TV and movies, so be it, but never package anything else with it. No phone, no Internet with Cable TV & movies unless you want to be gouged forever. As that will cost you much, much more over time, then getting them separately. Better just to go straight to DSL for internet, if you can not get FTTH.

Intelligent and smart, why on earth were you rated down? Amazing what you can get for less than $50 per month if you move to a FTTH community.

Perhaps some Cable shills with moderation powers....

Everyone can do this if you are looking to move. Look for Fiber To The Home (FTTH) like the less than 30 communities on this map.

The secret to look for is that the Fiber connection offers the same bandwidth upstream as downstream. So there advertised bandwidths are the same, ie. 10Mb/10Mb, 15Mb/15Mb, 20Mb/20Mb, 30Mb/30Mb, 50Mb/50Mb, 100Mb/100Mb, 1000Mb/1000Mb (1TB/1TB), unlike services that call themselves fiber but are not symmetrical and advertise 50Mb/5Mb - - - wrong, 50Mb downstream and 5 Mb upstream tells you they limit, restrict, censor, throttle their bandwidth. Move somewhere else.

With true FTTH, there is no business incentive to throttle, limit, restrict, etc... for bandwidth reasons.

Added bonus, having FTTH adds $5,000 to the price of the home, costs between $1,500 ~ $3,000 to run the fiber link from the switching service to your home and once run, that FIBER link is sold with the home, its property of the home-owner, not any other company, period.

Anything less than this is a wrong, a mistake and prepetuates the failed scarcity myth / increased monthly prices to perpetuity, which is the only reason to restrict bandwidth. To make you think its scarce, when its not, to get customers to pay more.

In the right circles, the Cable company CFOs will admit this scarcity myth fact to investors as a reason investing in cable companies makes more sense. We have a great business model, we can increase our customers rates anytime we want for as much as we want, thus we are always going to be profitable, invest in us

If you are moving, only purchase homes in a community in the map, avoid the others.

Another added plus, the communities with FTTH, are growing small business and jobs with livable wages faster than all other communities in the USA! Small businesses are thriving and actively looking to relocate to these areas for the bandwidth that only true FTTH can provide. Big data demands symmetrical FTTH.

A very smart post, you should be modded up!

And if XP is no longer supported . . . ?

They have no choice. Do they want their jobs? Of course they will switch. Just do them a favor and switch them to something better and not something worse.

In a corporate setting, all business critical macros would be identified and converted before that part of that business unit was migrated to Linux. Of course if the CEO says do it, it will get done and you know this. No point in pulling out the geek and home use only analogy.

You next sentance made me laugh, thank you for that.

Really pissed me off (and the VP of IT, thank goodness) when this happened to me with Microsoft Office. Was it Win 2000, XP or Vista, whichever it pissed everyone off. The final solution, the documents were coverted to PDF files and everyone was forced to move to the new version in spite of the incoming documents both from outside sources and internal sources.

We did stop accepting .doc formatted Word documents. Its a shame Microsoft chose to make their data formats incompatible with the Open Data Formats standards group.

Their (Microsoft) poor choice was/is not a reason to stay with Microsoft, but rather a reason to dump their office product.

Sadly many more businesses decided to go along rather than switch office products to LibreOffice. In one experience, they decided to start converting massive amounts of documents (the converters MS provided were not 100% effective...just another reason not to like them), talk about a loss in productivity and a waste of time.

Based on my over 20 years of corporate experience, the old analogies of...

No one ever got fired for recommending IBM ~ yes I am that old

No one ever got fired for recommending Microsoft

... simply no longer apply for Windows 8. As a CEO I would seriously consider looking for new management up to and including VPs that blindly recommend Windows 8 without considering Linux today.

I personally believe that Windows 8 presents a clear business risk that is best to be avoided. I know the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for Windows 8 is higher than Linux. I leave it up to others to learn the truth for themselves.

Others below have indicated their positive experiences migrating windows users to Linux. Windows users do NOT have problems with any of the many GUIs in Linux.

Based on my corporate experience, you would have CEO, VP of IT, DIR of IT buy in on the switch over to Linux from Windows, thus it would make sense that they would dictate a move away from MS Office to Libreoffice.

As for Macros with Word and/or Excel, a working group would be started to identify those macros critical to the needs of the business and someone would be hired to convert only those to to LibreOffice Writer and LIbreOffice Calc. Probably get a volunteer from that group to do the conversion. And all other macros, not considered business critical, would be considered 'not to be used' moving forward.

With executive management buy in, its a no brainer, without it, a move to Linux probably would not happen. Of course then that executive needs to be held accountable for the Windows 8 heck to come.

As for scaling, there are sites that have scaled to above 10K Linux users, so anyone who says it can't be done, is clueless, ignore them.

Best of all, remember that each new version of Windows takes more and more from the Linux kernel, so in reality, Windows has already said that if you can't beat them, join them, they are just not advertising that fact.

NO, in case you were serious.

Most often repeated FUD ever in the yes/no to Windows debate. Every version of Windows I have used from 1.0a as an app on top of MSDOS has required some re-learning of the Graphical User Interface (GUI) by anyone using it.

May as well take the same time to re-learn a Linux GUI instead. I would suggest Linux Mint, Debian or Fedora for desktop users.

Every new version of a desktop operating system will take a user some time to learn. There is no need to make Linux look like Windows or Windows look like Linux. There is no time savings or addtional time cost going from one to the other.

If a grandma can learn the GUI for Linux Mint, employees of your business can learn it as well.

And don't get me started about incompatibale data formats between MS Office products, just switch the office to LibreOffice and never have those issues again either. How many times has MS screwed us with incompatible data formats from one version of MS Word (in office) to the next? I remember two, time is kind, as I know it has happened to me more than twice, probably with one of the other office apps (Excel, Powerpoint, etc...). This makes MS a worse option as you never know when they are going to get you again and you can't say they won't, simply because they have...more than once.

The most important decision is the hardware, IMO, ONLY purchase hardware designed to run Linux from Linux Vendors ONLY. This means no big box stores, they simply do not do Linux well if at all. This avoids the proprietary chipsets that vendors have put in to favor Windows, esp with UEFI and Windows 8. Windows 7 will probably be the last MS OS I purchase because of the UEFI BS.

Personally I prefer ZaReason as they will install whatever distro I want on the hardware and everything just works out of the box. You could go System76 or any other Linux vendor, sure there are a few out there. ZaReason is just my preference.

Full disclosure, I do not work for ZaReason and have purchased their hardware...very happy with it, every time.

Yes, finally, my childhood come to life. Many an hour was spent making car sounds vroom, vroom, errrick (curve), vroom with my cousin with our Glow in the Dark Matchbox cities.

The idea of including weather info into the roadway (or perhaps a heads up display...) sounds interesting.

Just think it would be better in a heads up display than on the road.

Thanks for a great childhood memory.

To ebayers, sorry, my mom gave them away years ago, so you will have to shop elsewhere.

Like your thinking. More than once I wanted to run the new app with my past user environment and was thwarted, whether the OS was Windows, Linux or Mac OSX. It is frustrating not to be able to. Developers uncouple please.

I have needed to run old versions of software after a new version came out. As long as I can control where to install the application, I usually have no problem. However if the install process locks me into a specific area, than I know, down the road, I will not have this capability.

With Windows 7, PaintShop Pro (v10 I believe) attempted to force me to install in a specific area, however I figured a way around it, put it in a /prog area on a USB device. After that I was able to run PSP from any Windows box I wanted to without problems. I plan to do similar things with my tablets, use the micro SD card for both applications and data. No way should I be forced to connect to the internet to do something.

Because of the above scenario, as much as I loved PSP, I moved away from it simply because they attempted to force me to install in a specific pro-windows way/place. I was able to run an old version of PSP from that computer, in addtion to the new version. I figure I bought it, I should be able to install and run as I want. With the writing on the wall to PSP's stated direction, I left behind one of my favorite tools. GIMP is not as friendly, but extremely powerful.

Still see this as a big issue for my opensource tablet. It is frustrating. I no longer feel sorry fof those that lock themselves into proprietary hardware for an embedded device, whether it be a handheld or tablet. Opensource tools and products are the answer.

After reading (#46516745) above and some of the comments related to that post, the only thing I can think to do is make sure I can restore my tablet from scratch, document how to do it as I won't remember in a few months, and that would at least give me the capabilty to reinstall my android tablet from scratch should I get caught in this type of upgrade fiasco.

If your handheld / tablet uses proprietary pieces and parts, you will be denied the abilty to wipe it clean and reinstall from scratch (via the micro SD card slot) if necessary. In that case the fault is yours as open source, non-proprietary solutions are available, but some comapnies want to force you into only pay them for everything and anything model. Best to avoid their hardware/software unless you enjoy paying away your hard earned money.

Yours was the best of the bunch (minus formatting html tags), though I enjoyed reading about the trials and tribulations of punch tape vs punch cards vs tape/dat backup systems. The biggest problem I had many years ago was using a dat format system that I could not longer purchase hardware for. So I had tapes, but no way to read them. That taught me a lesson. Never use a media that I might not be able to read from 10 years from today. Thus I only backup on hard disks today.

I agree that to backup music, videos and other static content that has been downloaded via the internet (and not personally created) is a waste of time and space. As you pointed out, with even a throttled cable connection you can download this fairly quickly. So never waste time backing it up. Totally agree with you.

Now the one exception to video, pictures and music, are those that you create yourself. For your own personal pictures and personally created video. That needs to be backed up and I would suggest a harddrive (or multiple hard disks) for this purpose.

If you work in the video / movie industry creating content, obviously this comment does not apply to you...check into creating your own Linux video sever farm for while-you-sleep-rendering and a homemade Linux SANs like this Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage. You will have to learn some Linux to do this, but it would be well worth it, if you have the need. This article should help you, Thoughts about this DIY-Thumper and storage in general

For home users not in an industry creating massive videos, the next few paragraphs should cover you. Give thoughts to what you really need and why. Don't back up anything you do not have too. Like Software, Operating Systems, only focus on the data you create.

Plan your locations for different types of data, since you can label (mount point) your directory whatever you want. You could have one for video, one for audio (music), one for non picture images (your digital camera) and one for everything else. If you have the need, perhaps a DB directory as well. This would look as follows:

/video/ ~ for downloaded video, not home movies, never backed up (this will be your largest directory for most)
/music/ ~ for downloaded music, not self created, never backed up (you could write this to DVR or copy to a USB thumb drive if you want, the files are NOT that big. A 64GB thumb drive costs less than $30 on sale. Get a Micro USB adapter and only purchase micro SD cards and get very large ones. I use to use 8GB in my Nokia N800, now my zareason ZT2 Tablet has a 32GB micro SD card in it. Since I am using it for books, PHP development and research only, it will take a very long time to fill up.)
/myvideo/ ~ personally made video, back it up
/mymusic/ ~ personally created music, back it up
/images/ ~ digital images from your digital camera, back it up
/db/ ~ custom database stuff, back it up
/data/ ~ everything else, back it up

For the majority of you reading this, from /myvideo/ to /data/ (five different directories) will easily fit on one 500GB drive. If you are smart and compress it when you backup, you can probably fit a months worth of backups on that 500GB drive if not more. Linux comes with built in compression / backup commands and you can use PKZIP (or other compression program) for Windows to compress your data sizes and make your backup space go further. Even more if your backup method / scripts are smart enough to do a full once per week and than incrementals after that. Though today, its probably just as easy to do fulls each time and not full with incremental backups.

As long as you do not let any of the above drives / directories grow larger than your backup hard drive, you will not have a problem creating the backups and if necessary restoring files from those backups. The number of hard drives you need would only depend upon your rotation / backup needs. Thus after a month, you could potentially re-use a hard drive.

Only the data you need from day to day, week to week, month to month, needs to be backed up. And unless you are doing something with really BIG data this backup will NOT approach 20TB in the near future. Perhaps 1TB if you save allot of stuff, though that would surprise me...you would have to be in the 1% of home users to hit 1TB. Most home users will be hard pressed to fill up a 500GB drive with data only, no videos, no music. If compressed, most home users would not fill up a 500GB drive with a month of backups.

The key to the plan is to limit the size of your data in any one location to less than the size of your backup device (500GB, 1TB, 2TB). If you use 500GB hard disks to back up your data (hot swappable) than each of those data drives should be limited to less than 500GB.

Get a HDDRACK5 from Sans Digital ($29.99 per). Its a 5 bay rack that can be used with SATA drives straight off your computer. Simply keep at least one bay for backups and make sure to limit the size of your data on all your other disks to less than the size of your backup drive, 500GB, 1TB or 2TB should do nicely. And you are good to go. Some hardware configuration is required. If you do not want to do this, there are $200 - $500 plus options for you, search.

Still you do not waste backup space backing up any content that you do NOT create yourself.

And since net neutrality is in jeapordy due to the recent court cases, should the cable providers institute broadband caps as they have always wanted to do, even tried a few times, but supposedly say they won't...yea right, not buying it. You will not be forced to pay extra charges because your backup is in your home with you.

The through the internet backup tools are great today, I just have zero faith that the cable providers will not add in a cap one day, especially now that Time Warner and Comcast are going to merge. If caps hit and you are backing up over the internet, good luck.

For offsite backups you could rotate a drive out of your house to your safety deposit box or the home of a family member, just in case. Those fireproof lock cases are cheap at the local business store and will hold more than one SATA drive.

As others have pointed out, as your data grows in size, the time it takes to restore from backup grows as well. Ultimately as are local data grows, the time it takes to backup and restore will become the major impediment to the viability of your backup system.

Most importantly, whatever backup system you decide upon, practice restoring your data a couple of times per year. Better that, thant to find out after the fact your data did not get backed up correctly. You honestly do not know if you have not tried to restore, if your backup system works or not. This is more common than you realize. Test your restore before relying on it.

Thus a full restore, worst case scenario is:

Restore operating system (can you do this for your handheld or tablet? if not your backups may be useless.)
Restore software from source
Create directory structure you use
Restore data.

Hope this helps many of you.

For all those that contributed the information and humor about punch tape, magnetic tape, punch cards, dat, etc.. you all made my day. Thanks for the trip down memory lane. The only media I did not use was punch tape. Also I never punced core, though one of my professors in college did. Should have asked him how he backed up that punched core. LMAO. Wonder if it beat the tape cassettes that came with the Radio Shack Model I...probably not.

Remember how fast the floppy disk drive in the Radio Shack Model III seemed...also too funny. The tape system that I could not easily get was a Sytos tape backup system, worked great with OS/2 1.3 EE and OS/2 Warp, until the Sytos hardware died on me. At that point I was not going to waste more money on that backup system.

With Linux I simply use ls -alFR (as root user) from root (/):

login as root ( sudo or su - root, depending on how you have it setup)

cd / get to the root directory of that machine and/or drive

ls -alFR > /dirname/yymmdd-ls-alF.txt where yy is 14 for 2014, mm is 03 for March and dd ps 13 for today or this

I I had multiple drives, I would put one of these commands in a script, one for each drive and put the drive name after the date in the name in the filename to differentiate one text file listing from another.

The added plus is if a rootkit gets put on your machine and you have taken the time to get to know what files are put where on your machine, you will find that rootkit.

With Windows 8 requirement of a license by the proprietary hardware in order to perform a simple Linux install, is wrong. Its real bad. Just say NO to proprietary hardware.

Re-purposing a computer for One Laptop per Child or some other education use is why I buy all my hardware (PC, laptop and tablet) from Linux ONLY vendors. I figure I can always purchase a Windows license if I want one, however down the road that Linux hardware will not require a Windows license to run Linux because of some stupid proprietary chipsets in the hardware.

While there are many Linux only vendors, my favorite is ZaReason. System76 is another one, but they seem to focus on only one or two Linux distros, where the ZaReason techs will put on many more. Loving Debian lately and plan to play with Arch down the road.

Do yourself a favor, avoid any vendor that focuses on Windows and buy Linux hardware and if you really must have the latest version of Windows, purchase a license for your better LINUX hardware. At least it can run Windows without hassles, the converse is no longer true.

A Windows 8 device no longer runs Linux without hassles, best to avoid it for this reason alone.

Anyone know if this was how NBA player, Lebron James, Samsung was wiped? Its been covered on CNBC's SqwakonStreet today. For those that had not heard, King James basically tweeted the quote above, yesterday(3/12) at 5:03PM, and later erased the tweet. Guessed he realized as a "Famous Samsung Endorser", that might not look great.

End result, his phone was restored...when they announced this I was wondering when his last backup was taken and how many daysold it might have been.

From a German Twitter user, Shibumi @Sh1bumi #Backdoor in #Samsung Smartphones http://www.golem.de/news/samsu... poster, (thank you Google Translate):