Just my 2 cents.

They do have a split line between consumer and professional; if you tilt your head and squint really hard, that is.

And they put Metro on Windows Server 2012!!!!

It is a bit challenging hitting the little corner charms triggers when your UI is in a windowed virtual machine.

Or have access to a MSDN subscription.

Ubisoft lost me as a customer with Starforce on Splinter Cell:Chaos Theory. I bought the game and was never able to play it. By the time the cracks were out I had moved on.
Blizzard lost me with Diablo 3, due to service outages preventing me from playing initially and then their stance of blaming me for not buying an authenticator fob when my account gets hacked. 10 years on SOE and my account stayed safe. 2 weeks on Blizzard and I'm robbed of every ounce of gold my level 10 character had collected.

So let's look at the other side. I have a Steam account worth more than my car (granted, it's a crappy car) and every game that I purchased on Steam is playable (though Dirt 3 gets a bit annoying with the whole Games for Windows LIVE thing). Valve doesn't add any significant DRM to their software other than the basic limitation of not being able to play the same game on the same account in more than one location at a time; a limitation that can be bypassed by putting one machine in offline mode. No hacking, cracking or torrenting to get a purchased game to work.

Valve, as a company, has an estimated value of ~$3B; Ubisoft has a market cap of $0.6B. Valve may have the right idea about combating piracy by adding value rather than restricting use. I think it's very possible that the game companies that stay on the bleeding edge (their customers' blood, not their own) of DRM technology are actually caught up in a feedback loop where the DRM hurts legitimate sales so the piracy ratio goes up causing them to add more DRM to exacerbate the problem further.

Seeing PA get slashdotted (as well as farked and whatever else have you) gives me pangs of fear for my own web servers.

I assumed that since he's moving from a 1.5Mbit residential connection and only mentioned running a personal website he's probably not pushing more than the 15GB free tier allowance per month.

IO charges are tough to estimate but a micro running as a web/email server and not doing obscene amounts of disk thrashing should come in slightly cheaper than a typical gumball machine purchase per month. We have half a dozen internal services instances running databases, web servers, server monitoring and logging services in one region that used a whopping $2.16 in I/O last month. Our main region was a bit more but that's where we have servers that automatically spawn other servers depending on user load.

I actually factored the heavy use (i.e. on 24/7) reservations of $62 and $100 for my reserved prices. The actual monthly fee is about $3.65 after you've committed to (i.e. paid for) a heavy use reservation. That's part of why I put the word "average" in front of those prices.

Amazon micro EC2 instances are reasonably priced and I use one for my personal sandbox and mail server. Average price is $14.60 /month ($0.02/h * 24h * 365d / 12) for a no commitment a la carte and drops to an average of $8.82/mo or $6.43/mo with 1 or 3 year reservations https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#pricing . They also have a free for the first year program at http://aws.amazon.com/free/ to get you started.

You won't get KVM access for OS install but there are startup images for all the common free linux distros (Centos, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, etc.), Amazon Linux (a custom distro for EC2), and non-free OS's like RHEL and MS Windows (they cost more per hour). Every distro I've used on there gives you either direct root login or `sudo su -l` capability. You have full control over the incoming firewall rules so you can allow specific ports by IP or CIDR range without chewing up CPU or I/O in iptables. You can add additional storage on the fly (including via automated script within your VPS if you can program) and take live snapshots of running disks (including the OS disk) for backups.

I use Amazon for my work systems and much prefer them to managing an on site rack or letting some other host charge us for the impediment to administration that is managed hosting.

I use dvorak on a full size keyboard and qwerty on my phone. It only takes a context difference to keep the two muscle-memory sets from conflicting.

Thanks man, got it.

I actually have my slashdot mangled address next to my uid. I'd welcome an invite if anyone has one to spare.

I've yet to visit plus.google.com and see anything other than the Keep Me Posted button. Am I visiting the wrong address? Is searching for Google+ in Google the wrong way to go about it?

In Chrome and FF, Ctrl-Tab and Ctrl-Shift-Tab switch tabs, Ctrl-W closes the current tab and Ctrl-T opens a new tab. As a bonus, on Dvorak open and close are both on the left middle finger; open is on the home row and close is on the bottom row. It almost makes up for vim's :wq being on opposite sides of the keyboard.

It will if the mother does not leave the home after said water breaks.