Steam has an offline mode, but games can only be accessed if you at least occasionally authenticate with Steam. How often is occasionally? Well, in my mind, any number of times more than "the day that the game was purchased" is too many, but I know that if someone's internet connection is down and they haven't authenticated with the Steam client in the last couple months, games won't start.

As far as I can tell, "Offline Model" just stops all the non-authentication aspects of the Steam client, like the built-in chat service, but games that need to authenticate still need to do so occasionally. The last time I gave Steam a chance, I tried to play Dragon Age: Origins while my internet connection was down and found that despite the fact that I was "offline" and had logged in to the game client sometime before I lost my internet connection, the game wouldn't load.

And that was the point where I said fuck it, I'll just buy everything else from GoG or get it from Pirate Release groups.

You can also run DOSbox for Android and boot Windows 95/98 right now. That might sound perverse, but it does provide decent enough binary compatibility to get Office XP running with support for modern MS Office document formats through the compatibility pack and to run the ever popular VB6 apps that seem to be the standard for discussion in this thread.

I buy several hundred drives a year and I've consistently had more problems with all non-Enterprise Western Digital product lines than with I had with Seagate, Hitachi or Samsung models. By rough order of preference, I found WD "Blue" drives least reliable, followed by WD Green, followed by Seagate Eco models, followed by WD Black. The most trouble free drives over the last five years or so? Samsung's F-series and Hitachi DeskStars. Goddammitsomuch.

The current "Green" drives from WD and Seagate already create nothing but problems for certain workloads, but they're extremely appealing for one-off modest-density needs that are probably appropriate to most consumer applications.

Spinning disks are only dead if you have no bulk storage needs, unless you think prices are going to fall through the floor out of the kindness of NAND Flash manufacturers' hearts.

There's a single chassis in my closet that has 96TB of disks in it. That kind of density is utterly unthinkable on flash memory.

Personally, I run a Plex server that about 40 people can access; I also have a VPN end point set up for family members who live overseas; I have a not-inconsequential number of commercial web sites running and a private "cloud" storage service that I put together for my and my customers' needs. And yes I torrent like a motherfucker. My main server is a 24-thread, 48GB machine with 130TB of local storage that runs 24x7. I pay about $100 a month for electricity and another $130 for internet service, but I actually make enough money from the services that I provide that it's actually profitable for me to do what I do with it.

You don't KNOW what I do or don't need, and neither does my ISP. Your monthly cap closely resembles 19 hours of my average use, but I specifically pay for service that is uncapped and at a service tier such that bandwidth is a functionally unlimited commodity. I pay for the service and goddammit I'm going to use all of it.

Plex is a literal Swiss Army knife for this stuff. As long as you have a reasonably powerful back end like a retired Core i or even a Core 2 Quad, you're probably good to go on arbitrary amounts of real time transcoding for a typical home setup. If your Plex Media Server is on some kind of ARM or Atom-powered NAS, you have work to do, but even then there are pretty straightforward tools (e.g. Format Factory on Windows or Handbrake on whatever) that can whip a media collection in to shape if you absolutely need to do it.

Plex is damned near perfect for video but I will say that I have some oddball HD audio formats that it can't handle. Also, not all clients are created equal. It will work as a DLNA server as long as its on the same LAN with client devices, but DLNA-only clients really miss out on the presentation and of course some of the cool online integration stuff.

As long as you have an intermediary to transcode to a supported format, why is that a problem? Plex does a perfectly fine job right now delivering h.264 with AAC audio to less capable mobile devices that I own, as do a number of DLNA servers that are scattered around my apartment. Presumably if you're watching on a device with sub-optimal functionality, you're going to be less concerned about overall source fidelity in the first place; it's not like you care that you aren't getting the full bit rate and eight channel audio from your blu-ray sources when you're watching them on a 4" iThing screen with a $10 pair of headphones.

Presumably somebody out in the world currently has a non-open H.265 encoder. You're being obtuse even by AC standards.

Specs ARE largely irrelevant, albeit within reason. There's almost no practical difference between an i7 and a Pentium g CPU for most desktop computing purposes and there's little difference between a quad core ARM and a single core version for many mobile applications. Screen resolution, form factor and speed of data access are the biggest differentiating factors most of the time.

That said, Android is nearly-free-except-for-some-licensing-fees and Apple isn't going to open up iOS. Does anyone really think Microsoft is going to start giving away ANYTHING that's branded "Windows?" Because if Microsoft is trying to make money on its mobile OS, it's just going to price itself out of any sort of wide adoption.

Comcast Residential Service only targets the X%-highest bandwidth users (I've heard 10% and 1% at different times) with actual warnings and notices. When Since my daily bandwidth consumption frequently exceeds 100GB, I got a warning the first month after the cap was initiated. I had the person who called me about my usage connect me immediately to Comcast Business Services and switch. Hilariously, I still had to talk to a Residential Service Retentions agent.

I suspect you could probably find a no-name Android tablet and load some flavor of Windows Mobile on it if you really just wanted the big four Office Apps. IIRC the biggest hurdle would be that the screen resolutions supported by Windows Mobile are fixed and relatively stingy.

You could also just use the no-name tablet with Google Docs or the Google Docs web interface. No, it's not Office, but it's perfectly fine for everyday needs. Or use Office 365, which works surprisingly well on Android devices with relatively high resolution screens.

Windows RT is a real OS. The stock software load isn't as feature complete as I'd like, but I've found it to be less maddening to use than any experience I've had with iOS. The Metro interface definitely takes some adjustment and I'm not terribly fond of Microsoft's on-screen keyboard, but I suspect that if Surface tablets had been priced at $250 WITH THE KEYBOARD, they would not be a huge joke in the market that they have been so far. It might've been predatory pricing to gain market share, but the biggest mistake Microsoft made with the basic model Surface was assuming that it was on-par with the lifestyle brand that is Apple and that its offering would be treated as such.

I've got a 24 thread/48GB/108TB system in my back bedroom in spread across a couple 3U Norco chassis (desktop-style PSU and cooling and thankfully almost no noise) that can service a dozen 3Mbit real-time video transcoding requests through Plex and still has the horsepower to run five not-insubstantial Guest VMs at the same time. That machine actually saves me money because it replaced four i7 rigs that I had been using but I can't imagine what possible reason I could have for any more hardware than that.