All of these media "giants" became giants because they offered alternatives. Yet, they all think that their business model will be eternal. The studios fought against cassette tape recorders, VCRs, video rentals, streaming TV, MP3s, torrents, iTunes, time shifting. In other words, anything that made it more convenient for viewers to -- you know -- view their content was seen as something horrible. If they had their way, we would adjust our schedules around the 6PM Tuesday timeslot to watch some sitcom. Why do they fight technology so fiercely when they should be embracing it? Find out what people like to do and offer a solution... Or, develop a new way and people will flock to it.

Oh, wow. TFA looks more than just noise, but we don't know how true it is yet. That said, I've seen so many articles about companies disclaiming liability because the crimes were committed by a partner or subsidiary. I want to do that too. After all, if companies get the benefits of personhood, I think people should get the benefits that corporations do too. I'll spin off a subsidiary person. He'll do all the crimes (cutting off mattress tags, walking on the "Don't Walk", eating oatmeal without a spoon) and I can benefit. When someone bothers to check, I can raise up the mini-me and have them throw him in jail. I'll keep the profits.

I run lots of statistical analyses. Most of the code is in R with some wrappers in Perl and some specific libraries in C. The R and Perl code is pretty much all my own. The C is almost entirely open source software with very minor changes to specify different libraries (I'm experimenting with some GPU computing code from NVidia). Most of the people who are doing similar things are using Python with R (or more specifically, the people I know who are doing the same thing are using Python/R).

An average run with a given data set takes approximately 20 minutes to complete on an 8-core AMD 8160. About 80% of the run is multi-threaded and all cores are pegged. The last bit is constrained mainly by network and disk speed.

You may consider using something like Java/Hadoop depending on your data and compute requirements. Though my Java code is just a step above the level of a grunting walrus, I've found that the performance is actually not that bad and can be pretty good in some cases.

Yeah.. It's a fine line between telling an interesting story and just annoying half the audience. I don't mind so much if it's not central to the plot, but when a lynch pin device is so horrible, I get mad such as in the Angelina Jolie movie about bullets that could curve around in flight. That was one the worst, but there are so many.

Good points, but Linux works great in my household.

I'm running mainly CentOS and Linux Mint. My GPUs are all Nvidia running the proprietary drivers. I flirted for a while with AMD/ATI but still too much nonsense getting them to work right. Wireless cards are from ThinkPengiun mainly, with one system using an Atheros driver. This Atheros system occasionally needs to be reset, so I added a script that does a module reload whenever the network glitches. Yes, I don't expect the average person to be able to do that, but I also had to Google how to shutdown a Windows 8 machine.

The hardware was chosen based on what got the most number of good reviews on Newegg.

All this is meaningless without an application stack. Most of my work is done either with a browser or a shell. Google Play and Amazon Prime movies work fine, as does Pandora, Slacker and the Google Music site. Netflix, notably, does not work though I am streaming Netflix to a Chromecast device as I speak. I disabled one Netflix account after I converted a Windows system over and it no longer worked. If Netlix is reading, I hope they note that they lost at least one subscription because Linux was not supported (yeah, I can get it to work via Wine trickery, but not worth my effort).

The wife uses some Java based financial software. She's still a Windows user, but the OS is pretty much irrelevant to her. I got her app stack working on CentOS (the Java software, browser apps and desktop links to some URLs.

The daughter uses some web apps, Minecraft (Java based), YouTube and other miscellany. She also plays Nexuiz occasionally and Left4Dead. All work fine.

There's a similar rule in many places. Supposedly the law is to stop folks who use their front yard as a business. I once lived a few houses away from someone who did this often and it was a nuisance. The family also sold cars and every few weeks there was a new vehicle with a 'For Sale' sign on their lot.

The way I'd do it is to create a dummy printer driver that just writes to a file. Print the PDF to the dummy printer, which in turn creates a new PDF without all the junk.

The parents are supporting the hermits and have been over sheltering of them to get them to that point

My mom goes for her pistol should I set foot on her property, thank you.

I do have a first person account of a similar mixup...

Years ago I worked for a company called Metro Link (not the railway, but a Linux/Unix software development shop). We owned the metrolink.com domain name, which in itself caused a lot of confusion. At the recent Red Hat Summit I met a few railroad folks (IT engineers, not railroad *engineers*) and they all knew the railroad.

There was another company that made a fish finding device called a HummingBird Fish Finder. As luck would have it, our 800 number was off by one digit from the Hummingbird company.

So MetroLink made graphics and X server products. Among the different X-server products in existence at the time was one called Hummingbird. They made a product that provided a PC X-server. That was a recipe for all sorts of calls.

One of my current cell phone numbers was once owned by someone who skipped out on a lot of bills. I've had the number for a couple years but *still* get calls asking for him. Because these are invariably rude, I have tons of fun with them. I don't think (or intend to) to cause any grief for the former number holder, but it's more than fun playing with creditors with attitudes.

So for years I've been hearing that it's much cheaper to throw faster hardware at a problem rather than tuning an application or a server. It's finally coming back to bite us. Imagine if tuning had gained a 10% or 15% improvement. How much power and millions of dollars does that translate to?

It looks like it will be the rest of the industry versus Microsoft and Oracle. IBM, HP, Cisco, Red Hat and hundreds of smaller companies are getting behind OpenStack and Linux based infrastructure. At recent talks I've attended, Oracle and Microsoft were barely mentioned. The OS is Linux and the databases are mongodb, nosql.. No one is talking about MS/Oracle solutions except in a VMWare talk I attended a month ago, and even then it was mainly about licensing models. Oracle and Microsoft are in big danger of becoming irrelevant in the cloud.

Pull the logs and other supporting information including client notes, change orders, SOWs, source code revision history, etc. and present it. . You can explain that it's a matter of principle that you're doing it because you value your good name. I think it's unlikely that you'll be retained by that company, but clearing it up may give the thief a bit of heat.

It has happened to me while working at UPS. One of the admins there stole my training guides and put his name on them.

My company issued laptop is a Windows 7 system. This was a requirement as some of the tools I use only run on Windows (e.g., VMWare VSphere Client, some IE specific apps, miscellaneous other tools). Much to my embarassment, I'm actually the only one on my team still running Windows on my laptop. The others are running RHEL6 Workstation builds. Within a month I'll be joining them (my desktop is already RHEL6).

At home my main workstations are all CentOS 6 with KDE desktops. The main apps I run are the Chrome browser, konsole, Firefox, R, VLC Media Player, Pidgin, Octave and VMWare Workstation and Player. I fire up Nexuiz every so often, but I'm not much of a gamer. Other occasional apps are Blender, Gimp, GnuPlot, some Java apps, LibreOffice and occasionally a Fortran compiler. The only thing I can't do easily on Linux is video editing.

There's no compelling reason for me to have a Windows workstation or laptop any more. I always build my desktops and paying another $120 for a Windows license just seems a waste. If it was $30-$40, I'd probably have bought three or four licenses by now for running the occasional Windows-only software in a VM. Many of my apps are web based including my email, chat, spreadsheets, image management, etc..

Call it "Lexi Diamond - Ronda Rousey mud wrestle" and share it on a torrent and soon the whole world will back it up for you....

Seriously though, even if you were a previous email hoarder, you will likely be able to comfortably archive all your emails *and* the tools needed to access them on a USB stick. Start by finding all the tools you need, source included, and place them on your storage medium. Compress it. Send it to the cloud.

Mail files can be stored by year (easy enough to do with awk or other mail tools). It will a lot smaller then some may think when you consider the size of your mail spool to the typical Library of Congress (10 Terabytes around 2002). Newegg currerntly has a 3TB drive for $140...

This game will be called "Patent War"...
The object is to collect as many patents growing around the landscape stuff them in your pocket. The more patents you collect, the better are your chances against the Innovation Monster. Defeat the Innovation Monster and collect Gold Coins. Use the Gold Coins to buy Senators who can help build fences to keep the Innovation Monster away. Once you level up, defeat the Consumer Rights Beast and collect even more Gold Coins and even the Vorpal DRM which can stave off the Indie Media Goblin and the DIY Music Devil.