.NET and C# pretty much took over Java. Sure, Java supports more platforms, but it's resource and memory hog, insecure (there's tons of Java exploits out there but none for .NET!) and Java development is light years behind .NET and C#.

On the other .NET is really lightweight, fast and C# as a language is fast and easy, while it still allows to do a lot of powerful things. You also get access to some devices that Java doesn't support and comprehensive libraries like XNA. If you wanted to make a game, you could code for all Windows, Linux (Mono, even if its sometimes lagging behind on new features), Windows Phone 7 and Xbox360 all at once. Also, Visual Studio is much better development IDE than any other.

World doesn't have enough total bandwidth to provide everyone with guaranteed 100Mbps. Overselling and calculating from usage meters is the only way to deliver faster speeds to everyone. Otherwise we would be stuck at 128kbps. Even that is probably too much 24/7 guaranteed to everyone, it would be more like 48kbps if even that.

Yeah, because gaming inside virtual machine works so well.

They all do it because it's the only feasible way to do business as an home customer ISP. Just think how many customers someone like Verizon has and think if there is enough bandwidth to provide them all with 100Mbps guaranteed. No, there isn't. Home users for the most part don't need that much bandwidth 24/7, but they have a need to peak at such speeds momentarily. However, they all do it at mostly different times so it works out.

I rather take 100Mbps burstable bandwidth to home than 128kbps guaranteed. But whatever floats your boat.

Except for the services part, Windows memory management has been improving a lot with each version. It made a huge difference when they let the OS decide more intelligently where to put resources not in use to.

Most people who don't really understand memory management will just look at the processes and start bitching how much memory each program uses, or how Windows shows there isn't any memory available (while in fact it's just used for caching things). They're only half-intelligent, which hurts them even more than not knowing at all. The fact is, non used memory goes to waste. Every time there's memory that's free, well, it's just wasting it. It's much better approach that OS tries to use it all intelligently.

This same pattern of stupid comments can be seen in browser comparisons too. It's always full of people going "omg Firefox/Opera/IE is using this much memory!" while it shows that they don't understand what is really happening. The browser and OS reserves that memory because it speeds up things. If the memory is needed elsewhere, it can and will free it up. That's something that seems to be really hard for people to understand, as the same thing always happens in every browser story or story about memory management.

Which is far from cheap, even less so as technology in this area has been advancing really fast the recent 20 years and they've had to do it several times. It costs several thousands to bring those cables to just one building and even more in cities as you need to open up the streets. They are making it as an investment, hoping to get it back in subscription fees within several or more years. It's hard from artificial charges.

The overage charges aren't supposed to make them lots of money, it's supposed to keep heavy bandwidth users in control so that the rest of the network doesn't suffer. Also, it doesn't matter how much it actually costs to the ISPs at that point. Nowhere they say it costs them $2.50/GB, but that's the price they're billing from you if you use over something like 250GB a month, which most people won't. They're free to do so. You're also free to choose your provider. However, don't bitch if there are no providers that sell you at the price you want.

Note that sometimes just upgrading their network doesn't work. There is a limited amount of bandwidth available between ISPs and from city to city and to and from overseas. It costs billions to lay down new such cables in the bottom of the atlantic. When your ISP is the size of major ISP's, they just don't have the possibility to offer everyone dedicated bandwidth. It has to be shared.

If they have a need to control the amount of bandwidth some heavy users use on their network, then that's the best way to go about it. Or in fact, they could either offer overage fees or severely limit your bandwidth. However, they have saw the need to do it make sure the rest of the customers aren't affected. Those torrenting and using full 100Mbps home line 24/7 are just leeches that are bringing down the network quality for rest of the customers.

Of course, if you don't agree you can always go start your ISP. Seems like you'd make a fortune since you've suddenly found so easy and cheap way to do.

I'm sure they would provide you bandwidth at that price if you moved living inside server farm and one of the large peer exchanges.

It's not only infrastructure. Not even starting at wages for workers and other recurring costs, ISP's have to pay each other to buy bandwidth from them. Only the tier 1 ISP's can get away with peering without extra costs.

On top of that, their payment model isn't $0.xx/GB of transfer, it's $xxxx per Gbps of bandwidth. If ISP buys too much bandwidth, it means it will sit there without being used, or it may be used in peak times and be just sitting there the rest ~20 hours of day.

Also, it requires there to be actual connectivity available - for example, my country as a whole has something like 30Gbps in/out. Still they're selling 100Mbps for customers to use. It's perfectly sure that if everyone would use that 100Mbps at once to download content off the country, it would not be enough. However, it works out because home users rarely need that kind of bandwidth 24/7.

If you want dedicated bandwidth that is guaranteed, then buy it. Just be willing to pay over $1000 a month for your 100Mbps line. This isn't new to anyone - it's the same in server hosting world too, but there it's more clearly marked if the bandwidth is shared or dedicated as it matters more and some people actually have real need and are willing to pay up to that $1000 a month for it. With home users, no one would do that.

Before Google Apps Engine had an edge with its free plans, but why would anyone seriously use it now when there are much more capable Amazon cloud and Microsoft Azure available? Those two are also Apple's choice for their iCloud, while Google's services are missing from that list.

There's practically nothing that Google offers that others don't (except for the price before), and they're still missing huge amount of stuff that their competitors offer, like htis addition of SQL just now tells. For example, Azure integrates beautifully with Visual Studio, Eclipse and other development tools so that platform is just great to develop with. Amazon on the other hand offers different services for different needs - you get the file hosting platform that scales extremely well, and then there's the traditional platform with databases, ability to run code and so on.. There's just nothing that Google Apps Engine offers, while still missing a lot what competitors cloud services have.

The moderation system seriously needs thinking and redone. It's constantly abused on Slashdot, up to the point where it really has started to annoy people. All the stories are filled with slashdot groupthink comments and it's always clear what kind of comments will be modded up and which down. This especially comes up within certain subjects - anything anti-piracy will get modded to -1, as does anything that says good things about Microsoft.

This really ruins the comment system as one is supposed to only have certain mindset and he is supposed to do all the same comments over and over again. Then there is the other mod abuse what happens when someone sees a comment he really doesn't like, so he goes on personal war against the poster and downmods all his comments from his comment profile, causing him bad karma and inability to post. Moderation system needs some serious work.

Seriously, this is what you answer with when I criticize product honestly and constructively? You honestly think that for example Microsoft would response to my suggestions with a "fuck you"? They would thank me for my input.

It's no wonder open source isn't going anywhere if the answer to any criticism is "fuck you".

LibreOffice and OpenOffice both still seem really heavy. Java probably has something to do with it, but they just aren't nice to use. On top of that the UI starts to get kind of old.. I started using Office 2010 just lately and I have to say I love the Ribbon interface. It keeps useless stuff out of the screen and is fast and pleasant to use. It takes some time to get used to, but once you do there's no going back to the old clumsy interfaces.

Sure, you can take her shopping.

Own phone if it works, of course. That's why I said if he needs one. They're so cheap at the markets that I usually buy one to take with me if I plan to get really drunk. That way I don't lose my actual phone :-)