Thank goodness, a little sanity. "They should concentrate on making innovative products at prices people are willing to pay." It's interesting that no one (1) ever has suggestions on what those "innovations" should be; and (2) ever mentions that the only price they are willing to pay is zero.

The recent flap over Hulu charging was a bunch of posts like "LOL. They just don't get it LOL. If Hulu charges I'll just go somewhere else and get it free, LOL." How much do you think Hulu has to pay for their media streaming bandwidth? Media distribution costs are NOT ZERO!

One can usually tell where things are heading when you see the phrase "they just don't get it" in a story summary.

Music and movies are copied freely because they can be, in the privacy of people's homes, not because we believe we have some sort of "right" to content at prices WE choose. (Who granted you that right, anyway?) If food could be "acquired" for free we would all be saying that farmers just don't get it when they charge for creation. If cars could be "acquired" for free we would all say that manufacturers just don't get it. If software could be "acquired" for... Oh wait, scratch that example. Software is stolen all the time.

For every product you introduce that is stealable with close to no risk, people will. Surprise!

If the whiners could spend a tenth of their effort in suggesting new innovative models that would result in consumers turning off their bittorrent servers and pulling out their credit cards I'd believe there was something to "get". All I "get" is that if a product can be stolen for no risk, it will be.

Sigh.

Don't be such a Luddite. Obviously the VT-420 with its multi-session, super-comfortable keyboard, amber displays, and 50-line presentation are what the Son of Ghod intended. DEC died for our sins, after all.

Is it really 1% of the user base consuming a huge portion of the bandwidth? That figure gets tossed around a lot, and I wonder if it's true.

We decry 1% of world citizens controlling 90% of the world's assets (substitute your favorite estimate for the 90%), and 4% of the world's people (USA) consuming a vast amount of the energy of the world.

Do we not care about the disproportionate internet usage because the /. community are the ones doing the consuming? Theoretically, without P2P, would the "experience" for Joe six-pack be better? Or not?

Standard disclaimer, I've used a zillion operating environments, like most /.'ers, with my favorites being VMS and Ubuntu's flavor of GNOME (In MY DAY, we used punch cards, and we had to punch the holes out with a hand-bone of a squirrel we had to catch and skin ourselves. Now get off my lawn!). I also bought a GOGO Sugar machine. My kids hated it, I hated it. The wireless would lose all connectivity after each 24 hours (yes, my DHCP lease was infinite), after taking days of fiddling just to get it to talk to the secure wireless modem. I eventually gave up and got a USB wired ethernet connection. It still would hang randomly, though less often. And the only thing the machine ever did was FireFox. The "documentation" was more missing than real. I chalked all that up to the program being more focused on getting the machines to Peru and Mongolia. But it didn't make the system any less painful to use.

It now sits on the floor in my office, in a dusty heap. If I ever get the motivation I'll put a flavor of real Linux on it, but that's pretty unlikely.

If it had come out with a semi-standard Linux interface I think it would have stood a better chance of success, if only to me. How long did it take to develop the environment and apps when the resources could just as well have been devoted to making a lean and mean distro to fit the hardware? Poor resource planning, it seems.

Not that we necessarily were, according to some...

If this procedure became easy/commonplace, it would greatly facilitate lesbian genertic reproduction of two women, vs. one woman and a sperm donor. Since the stem cell used to create sperm would be XX, all resulting children would be female. Interesting to think of a slight but perceptible shift to a significant female majority world population (or population in developed countries).

Possible consequences: less war; economic trouble for the TV and gaming industries; the slow decline of monster trucks; the world domination of Oprah and The View.

I for one welcome our new female overlords. Mistress. *grovel*

I am married, two kids, nice house (4BR, 4BA), etc. etc. Unfinished basement. For those who don't know what that is (Aussies, among others), it's the concrete foundation, nothing else. We used it to store junk.

Then my two daughters got older.

I cleaned out the basement, and built my dream apartment. Large home office with a dozen GB ethernet wired ports, wireless router, three PC's, docking station for the work laptop, and a Lord of the Rings shrine. Also in the basement are a gym, large walk-in closet, full bathroom, storage, and a full home theater with kitchenette. All my clothes, toys, brewing equipment, etc. are down there.

The main PC's, server, RAID boxes, etc. all sit in a different room from the office, with patch panels connecting the peripherals from the equipment area into the home office. It's dead silent in the office even with all of the PC's going. I have a wireless transmitter to repeat the satellite radio signal from the outside antenna throughout the basement. In addition to the home theater the gym sports a flat-panel TV with satellite TV and DVR.

I own the decoration of the basement. The wife gets no say. Just as I get no say anywhere else in the house.

The only way you'd know I actually live in the main floor of the house is that I am in the family picture in the living room.

Love my family, but love my apartment too. And they appreciate that I have a place to hide, and have gotten all the electronics out of the rest of the house.

Sweet.

Sometimes, when you grow up, you get to move BACK into the basement.

Anything that justifies itself on the basis of "the user's experience" should be viewed appropriately - as a load of BS.

Apple contends that they want us to have a smooth, consistent user "experience".

Isn't that MY DECISION? If I choose to want concurrent apps (which I don't, the device doesn't have enough power to make it useful), who is the vendor to dictate my "experience"?

The reality is that they want their massive cut of the app store revenue, and alternate app stores cut their revenue stream out of the mix. Not to mention the possibility of messing with their carrier contracts. Any pathetic excuse like "experience" is obviously a sham. If they cared about my "experience" they would have delivered cut and paste two revs ago. If they cared about my "experience" iTunes would be trained to watch folders and automatically import music that is added to the folder without intervention. If they cared about my "experience" they would let me download TV shows that I have paid for via iTunes when connected to the internet via WI-FI.

And I say that as a member of my Fortune 100 company's "User Experience Executive Steering Group", which is a thinly disguised attempt to procure resources for pet projects...

Leaving development decisions to core programmers can lead to chaos in development priorities. A hard core coder may spend large amounts of time chasing down just that little bit of latency in the process scheduler; but what the business needs is a rewrite in order to simplify processes.

This is why the OS model has a hard time living in the corporate environment. Many times what needs to be done for the business is tedious programming driven by idiots (== users). No one wants to do that. So a core group of programmers ends up adding a plethora of new features that are elegant in implementation, advanced in design, and useless for users.

The other major factor in corporate America (can't speak for the other 96% of the world) is the vast armies of "business analysts". These people allegedly have communication skills with both users and coders. In reality, however, they are incented to drag out projects in requirements and testing phases in order to make their own functions seem more useful. Many projects I've worked on have burned upwards of 3/4 of the hours billed to business analysts.

The remedy? Coders who can speak Business, are WILLING to speak Business, are willing to let the needs of the users drive their projects, and the ability to code. In that order. These people are far and few between, sadly.

I have one too, a retrofit on my existing house. It eliminated the external (and massively undersized) air conditioning unit, and runs much more quietly than the gas system did. And the gas system was only 6 years old when I replaced it, so it wasn't a dinosaur.

One piece of cool tech I haven't seen mentioned directly is that the heat pump itself creates heat; this is siphoned off by a water-based heat recovery system into a secondary hot water tank. When the primary hot water tank needs input water, it gets the heat-boosted water drawn off of the waste heat recovery system, making the whole thing more efficient.

The utility is pushing the use of geo so hard that they installed a second service into the house, and any electricity flowing through that meter is 1/3 the cost of regular electricity.

New neighborhoods in the area are all being built with geo in it from day one.