Still need a big data drive in most uses

as 120GB-256GB is small for some uses and the cloud is slower and ISP data caps suck.

I'm going to pick one up for my desktop. I'm thinking of around 256GB. That'll work for my primary system. My data lives on a server behind my desk with approximately 3.5 TB of hard drives. No RAID, but the data I care about is backed up and stored on multiple spinning rust platters.

Seriously, if she has signal, she can stream talk radio from ... I don't know, RADIO?

Apparently not in the cement and steel canyon of downtown. Trust me, I've had to hear all about it and nod along, wishing some football or something would come along to rescue me.

Your wife sounds like a psycho. Anyone addicted to talk radio inevitably becomes a liberal asstard freak or a neocon asstard freak.

Not really a psycho, she doesn't listen to the political talk radio. She's addicted to Rover's Morning Glory. I find it boring and stupid, but she likes it. She finds video games boring and stupid, but I like it. So we each have our thing. Meh.

Or worse, runs your cell phone bill up.

This is why, if you read up a few posts, I mentioned that she might need her own cell phone plan while I'll keep my elderly mother on mine and just have one data plan for me and my mom's dumb phone with voice only.

She streams talk radio and other live broadcasts where downloading MP3s isn't an option. Since she MUST listen to it live or she will shrivel up and die. Also, she is a federal government employee so her computer is locked down worse than a teenage girl when Pedobear is in the neighborhood.

I don't use much data and that is definitely something I am thinking about when I get a new plan. Part of the reason is if I do anything data-heavy with my phone, I do it at home over wifi. My wife is worse since she is always streaming stuff at work. I'm about to make her get her own account and deal with it, too much drama about "needing" to stream stuff 8 hours a day at work.

Seriously, you spend $150+ a month for a cell phone or is that for your entire family?

$168/month with Verizon. Two smartphones, grandfathered into the $30/month unlimited data (for a little bit longer at least). Dumb phone for my elderly mother. So between data and family share, that's $80/month. Add in the unlimited text and other crap, that's $100/moneth. So $68/month for the base plan plus taxes and bullshit fees and junk. Yeah it sucks, but who's better? Is it worth $5/month or so for the hassle?

I notice Apple and MS don't sue Google they go after the small men who haven't the finances to fight back.

I guess Samsung is a small man with no finances. Assuming you don't count billions in revenue and the largest slice of the tablet market. Or how about the lawsuits between Microsoft and Motorola.

This is why Red Hat actually succeeds. They make their money from the enterprise users: servers and business desktops with RHEL. The "desktop for the masses" is Fedora. Everyone wins: Red Hat makes money from the server/enterprise market, and home users can reap the benefits of a solid distribution.

With Ubuntu you have a (until recently) good desktop distribution, but no clear way to make money and keep the train rolling. If Shuttleworth had created a server distro and aggressively marketed it, things probably would have turned out better than they will in another year or so. Just like Microsoft, Canonical is going to be late to the tablet party and pretty much locked out of the market. For a variety of reasons, Apple and Google control that market and it is unlikely that either Microsoft or Canonical will be able to control more than a few percent of the market. Definitely not enough to matter.

I think that the difference between your conversations and pizza ordering on an analog transmission and on a digital one WRT 4th amendment protection should be zero.

This isn't about analog v. digital. With an unencrypted cell phone transmission you are still paying for service and not just anyone is allowed on the network. Your phone has an ID that tells the carrier who you are so they can allow you to use the network and to bill you for service.

With an unencrypted wifi hotspot, it is open for anyone to use. Perhaps you may need to purchase something and enter a code in your web browser (although this is more and more rare), but by and large, the wifi owner doesn't care who you are. They are providing a service to anybody, not specific individuals.

Put it this way, with a car analogy. If I lend my car to a friend and charge money, there's no big deal. But if I advertise and let anyone rent my car, I am suddenly operating a business and a whole different set of rules and laws apply.

Other people are perfectly free to dream up their own innovative characters. Nintendo does not have a monopoly on this process.

What incentive do Nintendo have to come up with new material when they can simply rehash the same old crap over and over? How many Lion King movies do we need? Letting this stuff go into the public domain means they can keep rehashing it, but will be encouraged to develop new stuff. Since the entertainment market has a high barrier to entry to have the kind of exposure that these big companies have, it would benefit everyone.

Yes and no, because as Jim Sterling wrote about this last week on the escapist they USED to add new gameplay twists with each release like Zelda does. Now you have games like Meatboy and Rayman doing new things and giving us new twists while Mario...just treads water.

I guess its time for the big N to either bring some new talent in or let Mario rest for a few years because they are just rehashing now. Nobody wants to see Mario become another generic where they just slap a new coat of paint and trot it out, Mario is to Nintendo as Sonic was to Sega, you're supposed to bring your A game when you use the mascot.

This is one more example of how copyright is hurting innovation. If properties such as Mario or Mickey Mouse were in the public domain, the companies that created them would be encouraged to create new mascot characters and innovate with their entertainment. Instead, we get tired old rehashes again and again. This is why I haven't purchased a Nintendo system in 20 years. I'll play games on the Wii or whatever at a friend's house and feel thoroughly underwhelmed, like I've played the game or one almost like it before.

You mean how like how in the US the government can take away your business and give the property to some mega-corp with deep government ties via eminent domain?

How often does this really happen, though?

Are you under the impression that SEA lost? They won, and forced Phil Katz to abandon PKARC. Not PKZip, which was what Katz came up with him after he was forbidden to use the SEA file format.

SEA won the battle, but Phil Katz won the war when the ARC format fizzled and died leaving ZIP as the predominant compressed file format.

I think the OP was saying let Apple win their lawsuits, they're still drowning in a sea of droids in terms of market share.

No surprise here, the mind controls the body. Why wouldn't the placebo effect work both ways?

Not just the "placebo effect" but what if the so-called "inert ingredients" weren't inert? Some placebos are sugar pills -- my body, while not diabetic, doesn't metabolize sugar well. Drinks with HFCS give me migraines, for example. A sugar placebo would certainly have side effects not even considering the mind over matter aspect of the situation. That could cause an anti-migraine pill to make the situation worse, or cause reduced kidney/liver function as my body works overtime to purge the sugar from my blood (my body isn't used to refined carbs like sugar).

I should also have been more clear that I meant that Direct3D is the only part of DirectX that competes with OpenGL directly.

True, but anymore, the distinction matters only on a technical level. Who plays games without sound or high-precision input? Without its other sub-components, DirectX is meaningless to an end user. Without the likes of OpenAL, OpenGL is meaningless to an end user.

I remember when MS announced the whole DirectX concept, and I never thought it would work - I had thought the overhead of the Windows OS was too much of a resource hog compared to DOS to get reliable performance in games. But the ease of writing to one API, versus having to code your game to support all the different hardware on the market, won out among developers.

Early Windows was a resource hog, even Windows 95. Back when you had tiny amounts of memory and the responsibilities of the OS was growing beyond "display a flashing underscore and let programs do whatever they want (DOS)" every megabyte counted. But I also knew it was a hassle switching between DOS and Windows 3.x just to run different programs. When I heard that DirectX was coming, I was very hopeful. Being able to stay in Windows (95) all the time and not need to switch out to DOS for games was huge. I think the first big title I played that was written for DirectX was Diablo. Despite being hopeful about DirectX I was still skeptical. That removed all doubt that it was a good thing, and I've never looked back.

Now I'm running Windows 7 and Kubuntu 12.04 on two desktops and thinking back to the "good" old days I wonder how I ever got by.

Microsoft wanted to encourage game developers to embrace Windows 95 at a time when Win 3.11 had been seen as a business-application-only platform, with DOS preferred for games. DirectX was developed as a collection of APIs for games running in Windows 95 that handled input, graphics, music, sound, networking, etc.

DOS was preferred for games because it allowed low-level hardware access. Windows 3.x required everyone to use dog-slow GDI for graphics, which was only good for stuff like solitaire and minesweeper.

With DOS mostly invisible in Windows 95, Microsoft knew they would be completing against their own legacy OS so they had to change it. They had to create a way to play games in Windows but still allow low-level hardware access. DirectX was born.