I don't see much if any savings on the latest NY Times Bestsellers, but I have discovered a lot of authors that I enjoyed at very reasonable prices. Several of the titles on the Kindle bestseller list were ones I had bought - I just finished one by Michael Prescott. At less than $3 many of the books become impulse buys and I will experiment with authors that I had never heard of before, something I would not do as much if the price were higher. Even then if I am unsure, I can always download a sample and see the book interests me before buying it.

This was originally in my 486 tower that I built in 1994. Since 1995 it has been in a Pentium 100 that I still use for DOS gaming for the few titles that I was having issues with in DOSBox, though these days that is getting to be a very short list. When it was in my 486 it could only be formatted up to 504 MB due to the 1024 cylinder limit in the 486 BIOS.

I don't own a cell phone and have no desire for one. At home I use DSL, so it uses the same line for Internet and phone so I can't really pull the plug - naked DSL is nearly the same as going ahead and keeping my land line too. I see my son with $100 cell phone bills every month and think that is $1200 a year I can spend on other things than adding to the monopolistic companies bottom line.

What if I am still running Snow Leopard?

When dealing with the RIAA, bending over backwards isn't the position you have to assume...

Thanks for the suggestion Lord Pillage and elashish14. I had looked at Dia before, but found it lacked many of the features I used in Visio, though it is good for flowcharting and such. Though it's not anything Dia can make happen, many of the manufacturers supply shapes for Visio, so if I am diagramming a piece of Cisco gear I can have it look like the authentic equipment, down to the port level.

I am an avid PC gamer. I do not like to play a FPS or RTS on a console. I have tried gaming with Wine or Transgaming and while many games are playable, there seems to be some trade offs compared to a native implementation, such as speed or having to implement some workaround.

As far a productivity software goes, I could easily switch to Linux. Visio would be the one sticking point since there does not seem to be anything nearly as robust for network diagramming on alternate platforms.

How is an ISP expected to be able to determine whether a work is copyrighted or not? A review of an RIAA album might have the same file name as the actual copyrighted work. I remember that has already happened where a takedown was issued for a book report on a Harry Potter novel due to it having a similar title.

With so many connected devices these days, it's easy to go > 10. The AT&T guy that was working on my DSL a couple years ago said he had never seen anyone with the amount of devices that were on mine, but from some of the responses I see here, it is not uncommon. We do not have smartphones, or the total would be even higher

5 PCs and a Mac - I have a PC and a Mac, wife and kids have their own PC (and that is not counting VMs)
2 PS3s for Blu-Ray and gaming
Xbox 360
Wii
3 Ipod Touch
WAP
2 TVs with Internet
1 DVD
Work Laptop at times


I expect my toaster and other appliances will have a connection before long

I don't want Amazon being the man in the middle on any of my https connections. It's bad enough that they would be able to see all my unsecured browsing by using them as a proxy.

To be honest, about the only thing I use the postal service for is Netflix since the majority of what I want to watch is not available on streaming.

The USPS is also very cheap compared to rates in other counties, for instance a first class letter in the UK is 46p, about $0.74 cents, and they are unable to raise their rates greater than the rate of inflation by US law .

I tried a VR helmet prototype at SIGGRAPH in 1996. Even with the vector graphics of the demo the immersion was impressive, but in less than a minute I had a headache. I am sure the technology has greatly improved in the past 15 years, but headaches was still one of the main complaints of the Nintendo 3DS when it was released. I can watch a 3D movie and do not get one, so maybe this device has overcame that problem.

I have been using Total Commander since Windows 3.1 as a file manager. Every version of the Windows File Manager and Explorer seems very limited to what I can do with Total Commander.

This new one even looks like it is a step backwards yet again. I hate the ribbon interfaces in Office 2007 and used a third party addon to get the old menus back, so I doubt if I will like the Windows 8 ribbons any better.

I quit shopping at Gamestop because they opened many of their boxes. Since they are selling new games along with used for consoles, how do you know which you will end up with? Case in point, I purchased a Nintendo DS game for my daughter. Christmas Day when she opened it up and put it in her DS there were saved games on it already - it had obviously been used. When I bought it, I mentioned that the box was not sealed, and they claimed that they had to do that else they would get shoplifted. I replied that other stores have less employees in the store but don't have their games opened and behind the counter.

Another time in a different Gamestop my son bought the PS2 game Devil May Cry, again the package was open and the had the discs behind the counter. A few days later while playing it asks him to insert Disc 2, which was not in the box. We went back to the store and they still had the 2nd disc.

In both cases they made good, but after those experiences they lost me as a customer, and I had been shopping there nearly every week since they were Babbages. It sounds like they have still haven't learned not to open packages.

In this case it's even worse - don't they have to break the security seal to get the coupon? In the old days they could just re-shrink wrap it, these days most games come with a security seal as well.

I have used Cisco gear nearly exclusively for the past dozen years or so, but recently we put some Juniper equipment in our core and I will have to say that I am impressed with JunOS so far. They have a lot of features that are not in IOS. I particularly like where it retains multiple revisions of configurations making it easy to roll back if necessary. Sure, you could do that by saving various versions to TFTP with IOS, but having them right there on board is a lot handier.