You have a good point, but you have to keep in mind that "real" phone lines are hardly problem-free. The number of issues I've seen in the past year with real corporate phone lines (T1 and DS3) is seemingly unbelievable, and the response from various phone companies has severely lacked in expediency and ability to understand that the problem was, in fact, on their end. And I'm not talking about VoIP and SIP circuits yet... :-)

"The reason undergrads show up is they think it's going to help their grade by being present." Well, yeah, they don't just think this. It's been my experience that in classes where attendance is required (and about half of my classes did have required attendance), that attendance counts for somewhere between 5% and 20% of the grade in the class. 5% is significant, and 20% is huge, especially just for showing up. It essentially bumped everyone up a notch or two, and made it relatively easy for people to pass the class, even if their grasp of material meant that they shouldn't have passed. No mandatory attendance, and no brownie points for showing up. The high school-ification of college needs to stop, hah.

This. Once class sizes got down to the junior- and senior-level sizes (~30 students), the laptop distraction became most prominent in classes where attendance was mandatory. The one class that springs to mind is a PHP class I had to take, and the professor required attendance (it was something like 5% or 10% of the grade). The class was mind-numbingly boring for me (and at 8 AM to boot), and had it not been for my laptop and Slashdot, I probably would have fallen asleep. It didn't matter that I didn't pay attention during class--I still managed to get the attendance points, and still managed to upset the other students by destroying the curve (yes, there was actually a curve in a college-level PHP class that didn't even talk about sanitizing inputs, parameterized SQL, etc.). A discussion about banning laptops is one that might become worthwhile once/if colleges and universities can eliminate BS classes and requirements first.

Oh, absolutely. I can't remember for sure, but I don't think BeOS could even print when I tried it. It was also a single-user system, with no (or almost no) provisions for multiple users. That said, NeXTStep wasn't perfect at the time either. The big thing NeXT had for it was it was a lot (A LOT) easier to develop for, from what I heard. But from a user's perspective, BeOS had it beat, hands down.

You're joking, of course, but while Apple is a unquestionable business success story since Jobs came back, the geek in me wonders if it were the best decision from a technical perspective. NeXT was/is pretty good, but BeOS was amazing at the time. OS X is pretty responsive these days, but it still can't hold a candle to what BeOS could do on hardware 1/10th as powerful. Of course, it may have been a moot point if BeOS couldn't have gotten the business side of Apple turned around, but then, my interest here is the technical side.

Your overall premise is right, but I think you're way off on the timing. Sure, today, you can stream 720P from Netflix and the likes, but not all 720P is created equal. Just because you have 720 lines of resolution doesn't mean it's going to look even remotely good. I watched a movie on Netflix last weekend (supposedly in "HD"), and it looked like shit compared to a DVD. The problem would only be exacerbated with a 1080P signal, because I can guarantee you that they wouldn't devote an additional and proportional amount of bandwidth to account for the increase in resolution (i.e., even higher compression ratios and loss of quality). Of course, there's also the problem on the ISP end as well: When your ISP is also providing the majority of your TV content, they're going to do everything possible to discourage you from streaming from any source other than themselves (i.e., bandwidth caps), regardless of whatever technical limitations exist (and for the vast majority of America, there are still technical problems in place on download speeds, at least as far as "true HD" streaming is concerned). Now, you could argue that a lot of people just don't care that much, and you'd probably be right. But BluRay will continue for at least a few years for what I think is a relatively large niche of people who *do* care about the quality. On our 63" 1080P plasma, the difference between BluRay and streaming or DVD is so huge that there's no way you'd want to watch anything but BluRay, given the option. And while I'm the resident videophile, even a normal person can notice the difference...

I thought that the whole AT&T vs. UCB lawsuit resulted in all/most AT&T code being pulled from BSD, but AT&T was forced to give attribution to UCB for all the BSD code present in System V (and its derivatives). I can't say I know for sure, but I'd suspect there was just as much BSD code in AT&T UNIX as there was AT&T code in Berkeley's distribution. It'd actually be rather interesting to look at snapshots of System V code and 4.3BSD-Lite code from the early 90s, and see which of those two has more code present in modern-day UNIX derivatives (e.g., Solaris).

Exactly. If this policy stands, I can't imagine it'll be long before someone writes some iptables/QoS rules for DD-WRT/OpenWRT/et cetera that automatically perform the throttling for you, as needed. Just enter your bandwidth—or have your router perform a speed test—and restrict as necessary. Allow peak bandwidth for a maximum of 14 minutes, 55 seconds, and then restrict to 69% or whatever. Someone will definitely automate that. Definitely.

There were one or two CpE/CS/EE classes at VT that were difficult if you weren't running Windows (certain projects in ECE 1574, ECE 2504, and a few others, I'm sure), but once you get into the 3000- and 4000-level classes (i.e., junior and senior level), Linux seemed fairly well tolerated. In the college of business (specifically, the Business Information Technology department), Linux is quite usable, aside from certain classes that require you to use Excel and some pieces of educational software bundled with textbooks, all of which are Windows-only, of course. There is one class (BIT 4444â"Web-based Decision Support Systems) where running Linux can be quite helpful for the PHP-based portion of the class, though there remains the need for Windows when they get into ASP.NET stuff. And just as a shameless plug, there's always the Virginia Tech Linux & UNIX Users' Group. :-)