In the past week, I have had two CFL bulbs "explode". I put that in quotes because I wasn't around when it happened, so I am not sure what caused them to fail or if there was an "explosion". These lights were not on at the time. One was in my garage -- I came home and found glass all over the garage floor since it was in an open socket. For the other one, it was in my bathroom. I came home and went to turn the light on and when I unscrewed the housing a second one had busted. I was concerned about the mercury that had been released, but had no clue what to do about it other than open all my windows.

Suffice it to say, that hit just a little too close to home (no pun intended), and I won't be buying CFLs anymore. I could handle a failure a year, but I bought these bulbs when I bought the house -- and that wasn't quite a year ago.

Well here is some more for you...

I have Brighthouse cable in the Tampa, FL area, and I get ~4.8MB/sec (yes that is a big M for mega and a big B for bytes).

On a different note, I would suggest anyone that has Netflix streaming to check out VuDu. I don't know if it is available for anything other than the PS3, but they offer 9Mb (that would be a little b for bit) streams that look great. There is still the occasional pixelation on real high speed scenes, but I have to guess they are using h264.

Bottom line, there are plenty of providers out there that can stream HD (well what Netflix / VuDu call HD) in real time. AND there are some that could stream *real* HD in real time.

Fuck you very much....

It is all about risk versus reward, and let's see, risk: major oil spill that is really going to fuck the eco system up for a long time (potentially world wide). Reward: none. Yep, ZERO reward. Oil should just go away already. As long as it sticks around, the longer we are NOT going to have alternative fuel sources taken seriously.

Now I am not some eco-nut that is against everything that could damage the environment. Hell, come build another 10 or so nuke plants in my backyard and I will be a happy camper. Risk: when using a breeder reactor -- none (well so close to zero that it might as well be zero). Reward: 100% clean energy.

Bottom line, have oil wash up on your beach and then tell me that you would be cool with them "drill baby drilling".

On the flip side, if one of our nuke plants in the state I live in went Chernobyl, I would most assuredly change my opinion of nuke plants.

Two things:

1 - Why would I care about "global" market share when I live in the US? I only care about phones that I can buy and use here. Is that hard to comprehend? I have no idea why Nokia doesn't have more of a market presence in the US, but again, it doesn't matter to me.

2 - Nokia puts Symbian OS on ALL their phones. So while it may be a "smartphone OS", installing it on barebones basic hardware doesn't make it a "smartphone"...

When I first saw the new WinMo 7 interface, I thought that the UI was chopping off parts of words because it wasn't finished, or wasn't quite designed for the phone they were demonstrating it on. Now that I know that is how they WANT it to look, this has fail written all over it. It is ugly and cluttered, and given that this was *supposedly* a ground up re-write, I don't know WHAT they were thinking.

Bottom line, this sucks. There are 4 (maybe 5) major "smartphone" players:

Apple - iPhone - I have one, and I LOVE it as long as I can keep it jailbroken. But every new firmware release Apple wants to make it harder.

Google - Android - Google had a good idea, but the potential downfall of that good idea has come to fruition -- market fragmentation. I won't be getting an Android phone until I am sure that things will become(remain?) stable.

RIM - Blackberry - A couple of problems with these for me. 1 - They are mainly business phones, and therefore not my forte. 2 - I *like* the touch interface, and RIM doesn't have a decent Blackberry with a touch interface.

Microsoft - WinMo series - It wasn't until WinMo 6.5 that they *finally* got an OK touch only interface. I don't want to have to use a pointer to use my phone. Unfortunately there is still a lot of software that needs that pointer -- so MS came out with WinMo 7, with no backwards compatibility (that has been seen yet -- and I don't think there will be any), but the interface is aweful even for alphaware.

Palm - Pre - This was my "maybe" 5th contender. Palm has a great phone here IMHO, however, they haven't released a GSM version, so it is useless to me. People in other marker areas may hate AT&T, but in the market I am in I can consistently get 2.5megs/sec down and never have a dropped call. So, until Palm releases a Pre for AT&T, they are useless to me.

It must have been a very long time ago that you tried a private server, or you happened to pick a really crappy one that disabled LoS processing to save ram / cpu.

The "terrain" issues that you speak of are a lack of 3D data in the maps (vmaps). This problem has been solved for a long time. However (at least on Trinity and MaNGOS) you can disable vmaps processing on certain maps -- this will save you some memory and cpu usage. By default only map 369 (the deeprun tram) is ignored since it has no 3D data in the maps -- we aren't sure HOW blizz handles LoS (line of sight) issues on that map.

I would say that I am one of other scenarios ... the one that blizz doesn't like. I liked running my own server with just me and my wife playing that I quit playing on blizz's servers, and hell even started developing the database that drove the server I was using.

The later 1050 used double density disks (but could read and write single density disks with a lower capacity).

You had to get the doubler ROMs to get true double density 180k, otherwise the drive did some weird 1 1/2 density 160k...

-- Brian

When my son was born the nurse came around with one of those packets and tried to tell us that we *HAD* to fill out the SSN form. I told her no we don't. She got a little bowed up about it, so I ripped it up and said go find someone that understands that there is NO requirement to have an SSN. Finally someone with a clue came by.

My son doesn't have an SSN and he won't have one until he is old enough to understand the consequences of getting one. My parents got me one when I was 7 or 8 and I am still pissed off about that. I soooo love my mom for deciding to cut part of my dick off as well -- circumcision is child abuse and mutilation (sorry, just had to get that in there as well).

No, they ARE the problem and they are looking to create more problems. They are the solution to nothing...

I should have specified that I was paying ~$20.00/mo more for my total TV / Internet bill compared to the TV / Internet / Phone bill I was getting from Brighthouse (notice I no longer have phone service).

My bill for all 3 services from Brighthouse was ~$150/mo with $30.00 of that being for fraking phone service that I didn't even want, but had to get in order to get 20/5 speeds.

So now my bill with them is $75/mo for 20/5 biz class and I am giving DTV ~$100/mo. So I was paying ~$150 and now I am paying ~$175 so ~$25 extra.

Here is the thing though. I had to tell them to take a hike when they sent me the first quote for $95/mo for the biz class. They got the residential retention department on the phone with the business department, and a few days later I had a quote for $75/mo (which I grudgingly took -- little did I know what a deal I was getting).

-- Brian

My advice would be to get business class while you can, WITH a contract.

About a year ago Brighthouse royally pissed me off with their slow roll out of SDV (switched digital video), and their horrendous HDTV offering. My solution was to get DirectTV and keep BH only for Internet. The problem was that unless you purchased their "all in one" package (cable, phone, Internet), you couldn't get their highest speed tier (20/5). I was told if I wanted just Internet, at that speed tier, that I would have to get business class and pay extra. This really miffed me at first, but now I see it was a blessing in disguise...

Bottom line, I ended up paying ~20/mo MORE for DirectTV + BH biz class, but I got much better TV service.

Now it looks like I am also going to see the benefit of having a contract. I am locked into a 3 year contract, but I am guaranteed that I am not going to be paying $150+ for unlimited bandwidth since that is included in the biz class contract (which they can't just arbitrarily change). As it stands, I pay $75/mo and that gets me 20/5 unlimited bandwidth, static IP, and NO restrictions on services (IE: no blocked ports).

Something to think about,

-- Brian

Was there something wrong with coming up with an addressing scheme that DIDN'T involve hex?

For example, go 64bit and use 16bit "hextets" -- 512.512.512.512. With that scheme you would have full backwards compatibility by using good old standard CIDR. If someone owned 1.255.255.255/8 today, with the switch they would still have that allotment, but we would now have 1.511.511.511/8 available as well. Am I missing something really obvious here?

For that matter, if we REALLY needed 128bit, go with either 32bit "somethingtets" -- 1024.1024.1024.1024...

Again, I would really like a network engineer / programmer to explain why this wouldn't work.

Who had the bright idea that we had to use hex for ipv6 AND have it not be backwards compatible.

From the people I talk to, the biggest reason they haven't gone ipv6 on their home networks is "because then I have to think in hex", with the secondary reason being "there is nothing available on ipv6 that isn't on ipv4 anyway".

Thanks,

-- Brian

You must have some mod in your preferences that is showing that as +5 Troll; they only got +3 Troll on that post...

Also, to the GP, RTFF. There *is* a +5 Troll achievement...

-- Brian