If you have an android device, or even an important email / google voice account, getting banned would be a nightmare. So now you're looking at multiple accounts, which loses the whole 'integrated' advantage.

Google needs to take a serious look at their banning policies and how they have ripple effects. Being banned from their social media shouldn't affect any of your other accounts. Email abuses (like spamming) are a completely different transgression than not meeting google's (apparently puritan, also seemingly arbitrary) social media standards / rules.

I tried out several software suites for my HTPC and ultimately ended up with XBMC.

There's enough free content that if you're a casual TV watcher you can get away without it. There's a "free cable" plugin that pulls in a bunch of channels, along with hulu free (of course, who knows how long that will exist).

I use amazon prime to get all the "free" prime movies/shows and that is another ton of content.

Unfortunately blockbuster isn't working but I believe Netflix does on windows ( don't have that ). It's silverlight.

There are tons of handy plugins. Anything from adult plugins (pr0n) to academic earth.

I drive it all from my harmony remote, audio passthrough through video hdmi out to receiver.

Once I get mythtv going to record football I'm going to (finally) cancel comcast. I hope that one day HBO / Showtime will smarten up and offer modular monthly subscriptions, instead of requiring you use a federated login based on your cable/dish provider. Lame.

XBMC is flexible/hackable enough to make me happy since I can make most anything work, but presents media simply enough my computer illiterate girlfriend can drive it all. Win.

Why should I pay for a bunch of channels and service I don't want?

If they offered modular, on demand service I wouldn't have to monkey around with xbmc, encoding etc.

Services like on-demand streaming of movies/tv where you pay exactly what you want are the future. The cable company can't let go of their monolithic 'screw you cuz we can & always have' thinking. Eventually they will go the way of the labels as far as monopoly via audio CD's - technology will evolve past them (already is/has) and they'll just be left waving their wizened fists angrily, struggling for relevance and trying to screw people over with control of cable internet.

1) dd mbr + data on disk

2) sfdisk partition data, then use xfsdump/xfsrestore to recreate the partition data on disk

Both of those have the advantage of being easily scriptable, and a disadvantage of being fairly dificult to deal with variable disk sizes without doing quite a bit more work.

You could also look at partimage which may be more what you had in mind - http://www.partimage.org/Main_Page

+1 to spideroak. It's the best in breed, with actual clueful engineers who care about what they're doing & keep up with industry practices / laws that would impact them.

Oddly the version I'm running is called 'KVM'. It's got lots of features and is free.. thanks, vmware!

The modern executive animal possesses extraordinary foresight; written into their contracts are both buyout and early termination clauses.

They'll still get their golden parachutes, just not quite as much as if the stock valuation had happened.

They will use their parachute to gently land in the next company, with similar contracts, and use the "My company got sold to Microsoft, we were a success!" angle to get paid boatloads more money.

Poor executives. It's a hard knock life.

I remember specifically in 2000 at an IBM Developerworks conference, they were all hot for Teh Bluetooths, talking about how when you walk by a BT enabled vending machine it'd send a coupon to your phone.

I'm sure someone has been talking about this scenario for many more years than that. It's an advertisers wet dream.

Didn't want it then, don't want it now.. and unfortunately it's much more realistic now.

More spam to buzz my phone == fail, especially when it buzzes just because I'm walking by the shopping district to get to work. I'm sure you'll be able to disable it, for now - but even additional management of my mobile devices because of marketing drivel would piss me off.

Smart people get tired of underachievers and it's pretty easy to recognise.

I think most people want to try to do the right thing, follow best practices / stay professional. Often organisations make it easy to get disgruntled, when there's a perception that the brass don't know/care about what you perceive to be the "real" problems.

That aside, the most miserable places to work are usually where people are just phoning it in. You might have a little less up-front stress, but I'd argue the lack of any sort of job satisfaction or doing anything to take pride in would ultimately lead you to be less happy in life.

We all coast sometimes, or make compromises - but if you solely operate that way in your career you won't be getting too far. Especially in smaller tech communities where there is a small degree of separation.

Since cash is (relatively) anonymous, and bitcoins are anonymous, I don't see the difference.

At the end of the day, DEA and other agencies can and will infiltrate this new marketplace, so when you place an order for 1lb of pot, you're gonna get busted.

This concept of anonymity can work for digital information and media, but anything that shows up in a parcel is a huge risk.

These shady sites are nothing new. I may or may not have used them myself, and they may or may not have had ways to obfuscate your purchase. I get confused a lot, so it probably never happened.

I should really quit replying to this article, my karma is going to hell. People are misunderstanding me. I'm not talking about if they're all just PPC ripoffs, or if Microsoft "stole" their design (clearly they did not). My point in my original post was simply that Microsoft benefited by waiting to see what Sony did by using a chip provided by IBM that was largely funded by Sony, and that going second is a lot cheaper to 1up when it comes to hardware wars.

"The Xenon processor was not a ripoff of the Cell, IBM just used some of the technology that they developed with the other processor."

That's exactly the point, the technology was developed by IBM at the behest of Sony for the PS3. It was a joint effort but largely funded by Sony, which is why they're so leery on doing so again, exactly for the reasons you made.

"The article says that all the companies involved had the right to use the technology developed for the Cell for other projects and other customers. This is standard practice."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(microprocessor)#Xenon_in_Xbox_360

No matter if it was malicious - Microsoft benefited in their consoles from technology funded by Sony. Sony has realized their mistake.

A little frustrating that I got marked as a troll, and I appreciate your response. This is all to do with business, little to do with the actual technology.

Xbox 360 is using a direct ripoff of Cell, they're essentially the same architecture.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenon_(processor)

For some reason I keep getting modded down for mentioning this though. http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2192216&cid=36269976

*shrug*

They are using a direct ripoff of Cell - this was supposed to be a reply to this comment;

http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2192216&cid=36269976

They ripped it off, it's well known. Apparently not by everyone though.

They sure as shit are.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123069467545545011.html

Taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360#Development

. This was because the system's PowerPC 970 processor running the same PowerPC architecture that the Xbox 360 would eventually run under IBM's Xenon processor. The cores of the Xenon processor were developed using a slightly modified version of the PlayStation 3's Cell Processor PPE architecture. According to David Shippy and Mickie Phipps, the IBM employees were "hiding" their work from Sony and Toshiba.".[21] Jeff Minter created the music visualization program Neon which is included with the Xbox 360.

But keep modding me down because of your own ignorance, I don't mind. :)

Xbox got a huge boost out of letting Sony do the initial R&D on the Cell architecture, in collaboration with Toshiba and IBM. So when it came time for the 360 to use the Cell, most of the hard (expensive) work had already been funded largely by Sony.

I think they're probably willing to play a waiting game to see what Microsoft does, then 1up them - much cheaper to go second.