Pick any of the online printers for a cheap price (snapfish, shutterfly, etc.), they are all about the same and will print with a quality photo processing machine on quality photo paper. Don't try to print any pictures you want to last at home. By the time you put enough money into it, you could have bought 5 copies of each of your other photos from a pro.


All that said, I would recommend only printing what you really want now (for frames, photo books, to put on the fridge, etc). Don't print them "to have a copy in 20 years". I do agree having a photo sharing site as the sole copy is a bad idea, but keeping them digital isn't.

I have all of our kid's photos on a computer at home (RAID 1 setup, but that may be too much for some to deal with), a second copy on a usb hard drive at home (for local backup), a third copy on a server I have in collocation (a similar solution would be mozy, carbonite, backblaze, etc.), and then the majority uploaded to Google Picasa for friends and family to view and order prints.

Sure, JPEG (what 99% of my photos are in) may not be around forever, but odds are, it isn't going to disappear overnight and I would much rather, in 10-20 year or whatever when JPEG goes away run some converting program overnight than deal with storing a bunch of shoeboxes of old photos.

Just keep your photos digital and put them on as many hard drives and in as many places as you can.

Sure, as long as you also don't want to travel by car or train or subways or ferries

I guess that still leaves by foot (as long as you don't go in a subway tunnel) and maybe horse. I guess we really shouldn't complain.

Exactly. I have often seen it quoted that for every 10K extra in salary you would expect to make, you should add an extra month to your job search/time without work in case of a layoff. Generally, a 35 year old expects to make more than a 25 year old. It stands to reason that it would take a little longer to find a job.

Instagram isn't a good data point. The instagram purchase was done pretty much by Mark Zuckerberg alone, and then told to the Facebook board (not proposed).

Pretty much it was a rich kid saying, "oh yeah twitter, 1 Billion dollars, how do you like that?!?"

I don't think this bubble is the same. Recent IPOs (Groupon, Zynga, etc) have pretty much calmed down (although they may still be somewhat too high, it isn't as crazy as the last time). Google just make 2.9 Billion, so their valuation is pretty reasonable. Facebook, according to SEC filings is cash positive, so it isn't unreasonable to place at least some value on them as well.

If the temps are in "operating ranges" which run higher than you might think (check with the hard drive manufacturer for specs), temperature doesn't correlate to drive failure:

http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-budget-v2-0revealing-more-secrets/#more-337
Look for the "lessons learned" section in that link.

Hard Disk Sentinel: http://www.hdsentinel.com/ is a great tool They even have a free Linux client. What it does over SMART is that it takes the SMART data and weights them according to indications of failure, then gives you a score of 0-100 (100 being great, 0 being dead) as to how healthy the drive is. We use this extensively and have created NAGIOS scripts that monitor the output. Generally, if a drive has a score of 65 or higher, I will generally continue using it (pretty much all my setups are RAID 10 or RAID 6). If the score starts dropping rapidly (a few points every day, even if it started high) or gets below 65 or so, I go ahead and replace it. It has helped out a bunch.

Even with that, using the SMART data, in a SMART way, still only predicts about 30% of failures. The other 70% will come out of no where. That is why it is best to assume all drives will die at anytime and are suspect and never allow a single drive to be the sole copy of anything.

The problem is that, at the time these "unlimited data" plans were sold and the contracts were signed, there were no constraints (i.e. throttling). iPhones started killing AT&Ts network, so they stopped selling "unlimited data" plans and started only selling only plans with a specified amount of data and prearranged overage charges (2 GB, 5 GB, etc.)

The people with existing "unlimited data" contracts were grandfathered in and for a time, nothing changed. Recently they have started throttling the grandfathered "unlimited data" customers, something that was never part of the original agreement. That is what everyone is so upset about.

Amen. I own a small consulting company. We pretty much only do Linux servers where at all possible. We do support and generally recommend Windows desktops. Close to 90% of my revenue comes from Windows support. The Linux servers, you set them up, collect your fee, and don't look at them for a year. I often have a challenge to justify upgrades/patches because the server just works so well.

Windows desktops though, break all the time. They get viruses, Outlook pst files get corrupted, and it just craps out in general. This is where I make my money.

As long as you can clarify that stuff is not your fault, but rather something that just happens (I wouldn't advise a long Microsoft rant though, people will just think you are making excuses), then there is tons to be made in Microsoft support.

I have people say all the time "I bet you get tired of computers breaking". I always respond, "No, if computers stopped breaking, I would have to find another job."

I agree that it is just a matter of opinion. Honestly, if it is completely open and upfront like this, I really have no issue with it. I am actually considering trying to sign up for this, and I have a BS in Computer Science, work in IT, and visit Slashdot daily. I honestly don't really see what all the concern is about.

It wouldn't be very hard to get most details of my life from just a little browsing habits, and really, I can't think of anything I would care about other people knowing. If anyone asked me straight up, I would probably tell them. I am completely fine with people that want to keep there privacy and don't even see it as "they have something to hide", but I honestly don't care. I generally assume that anything other than thoughts that are only in my head are known to others and my thoughts can probably often be inferred. Maybe I am just too simple minded though.

If I have a choice to keep things private if needed (maybe I need to overthrow a king or something), then I am cool with companies "invading" my privacy. There just needs to be an opt-out, even if that opt-out is "don't use the service (read Facebook)".

That's why I use Subsonic. With it and my android phone, I have as much storage as I can fit into a server using SATA drives (currently in mine, 2 TB). I never have to worry if I loaded the song/album I wanted to play, if it isn't already on my phone, I just pick it and subsonic streams it. It caches locally a fixed amount that you can set, so you still have music to play if you are out of a coverage area. I fought for a while to keep getting more and more storage on a Rockboxed mp3 player, but eventually just gave up once I found Subsonic.

I have a Sansa e280 with Rockbox on it. I once used it for all my music, but now I just use it for audiobooks. All my music is now through my phone.

Here is my setup: I have a Motorola Triumph on Virgin Mobile, my costs were $129 for the phone (I got it on Black Friday, they are around $220 on Amazon, or you can get the Optimus V for about $100 which also is a nice phone). My monthly plan costs $25 a month (this plan is $35 now, I'm grandfathered in). That's it. I get unlimited data (rate limited after 2.5 GB, but then still fast enough for music streaming). So, overall, my phone costs aren't much more than a "dumbphone" plan. At least for my needs.

For music, on my phone I have Pandora, Slacker, and, the coolest of all Subsonic. Subsonic is a music streaming service that I run on my home Linux server that gives me full access to my entire music collection, wherever I am. So instead of trying to fit everything on one MicroSD card, I just leave it on my RAID 10 array at home and stream it from there. Subsonic also caches however much I want on my phone locally, so if I don't have wifi or 3g coverage, I still have around 2 GB (my current setting, you can go higher) of music on my phone to play. With cynogenmod and DSP, the music sounds great to me in my car or though headphones, although I will be the first to admit that I don't have the most "sensitive" ears.

Anyway, just my 2 cents.

Umm.. The meddled with the distro to turn it into a tablet type OS. The main thing everyone complains about on the desktop, Unity, would actually be pretty nice on a tablet.

This has been their intention all along.

Umm, they did exactly that. Check out the last four pages of the article. Basically, T-Mobile is really good if you live in the middle of no where (until AT&T buys them that is).

I was more or less in the same boat. Here is what I did:

No home phone (why do you really need that anymore anyway, I guess that could very for some).

Cell Phones, Virgin Mobile LG Optimus V. It is a great android phone and my monthly service is $25 for unlimited texting, unlimited data, and 300 minutes. They have higher minute plans if needed, but going over minutes isn't very expensive and you can restart a plan early. My wife and I were on a family plan with AT&T, but two VM plans is cheaper. After the initial cost of the phones, we are coming out way ahead and get a lot more.

TV: We were spending about $100 per month with Dish. Bought a Roku box for living room, put the Wii in the bedroom and got a $9 Netflix streaming plan. Got a $3 a month (averaged out) pandora paid subscription for music. Put a $45 antenna in the attic. I now get better quality HD locals than with Dish (I also have a computer setup to record if desired, but that admittedly does add extra expense) and we watch everything on Netflix or Hulu. Sure, we don't get to watch everything we did, but there is plenty for us to watch (including our daughter) and we shouldn't be watching so much TV anyway. Plus, the way I put it to my wife was "Is $1000 a year worth it to watch House Hunters on HGTV"? I think when you put it in terms like that and realize that if you give up a few shows to save a lot of money, it is an easy decision. Also, I tend to find that for most people that have "can't miss shows" after a few weeks of not seeing them, they don't really care about that show anymore. All they really want is a few hours of mindless TV entertainment and the exact show doesn't always matter.

What about the Asus Transformer? It is $400 (equivalent iPad 2 is $500) has the internal memory, a dual core tegra chip, same gorilla glass ips screen, etc. It also has Flash, you don't have to use iTunes, and there are a lot more apps/options in general than iOS. I have one and love it.