The letter to the investors went into much more detail, and that's what caused the recent share plunge. A couple things stuck out - churn rate is up, they lost more customers than expected, they expect to continue losing customers into the next quarter, and they spent more than double the amount on streaming content.

From Q3'09 - Q2'11 Netflix added between 500k - 3M customers a quarter, so losing 800k customers in a quarter is a huge change. Especially when costs for new content are climbing.

The $9.99/$15.98 plan is for streaming with 1 DVD at a time. Other plans allowed for more DVD's at a time and blu-ray. The letter mentioned that they had customers who had, but did not use, streaming. These customers dropped down to the cheaper DVD only plan after the price increase.

This is anecdotal, but the Netflix customers I know, including myself, all changed to cheaper plans. In short, they're hurting.

The confusing part to me is that he is even trying to compare 3 SSD's to 60 HDD's. He must have sacrificed capacity, reliability, or both (most likely) on the SSD side of things for this test. I could not find any mention about the RAID level or capacity of his tests in the article. The results are meaningless without that information.

I've had awful luck with Netgear. Twice I bought a consumer level Netgear router, and each time it would lose its net connection and need a reboot after a day or so. I never had that problem with Linksys.

I've been running a WRT54GL with Tomato for a few years now without any complaints.

Raising the debt ceiling was never a "to the wire affair", it was always handled as routine. In fact, S&P specifically mentioned using the debt ceiling as a political bargaining chip as part of their rationale for the downgrade.

You've got that right. The vast majority of the requests for my employer's web page come from Windows XP, and the site is only of interest to businesses. Here's a rough breakdown:
80% - Windows XP
11% - Windows 7
4% - Windows Vista
3% - Mac OS X
2% - other (Linux, other Windows version, etc)

Count yourself lucky - our support contracts are much more expensive under Oracle than they were under Sun.

The problem is not that they changed the major version number. The problem is that they dropped support for Firefox 4 after only 3 months. It's hard for a large company to justify going through the whole testing process for a product which only has a 3 month shelf life.

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS still uses Firefox 3.6.

I noticed that too this morning. It was simply beautiful.

You can still run "sudo vi" and then drop to a shell. Now you're root. Locking down sudo is incredibly difficult. You almost much have to assume that you are giving away root if you use sudo for more than a very restrictive white-list of commands.

Exactly. And I figure that if I'm going to go through the hassle of a dual boot, it might as well be Windows for games and Mac OS X for everything else. Linux has been relegated to my desktop at work.

I agree with you, but I also know that I'll be buying Diablo 3 on launch day (whenever that is).

You will be glad to hear that they have removed the cuteness of the AI leaders. They look realistic, and they don't make lame jokes.

Senators are supposed to only include riders which are germane to the main bill itself. If a Senator objects to including a rider because it is not germane, then they hold a vote to decide if it is germane or not. They don't have to actually explain why it is so. I was pretty depressed when I found this out. I used to think that things would be better if there was a law which prevented adding riders to run unrelated bills. But it turns out that law already exists, and our politicians are even sneakier than I imagined.

I worked as a laborer for a home construction company during my first two summers of college. One day I was told to build out the walls in a bathroom which was in the corner of the house. Basically the exterior walls would get insulated, and I had to build a second set of walls for the plumbing and interior. Instead of two walls meeting at a 90 to form the corner, the two walls joined a third wall at two 45's, and this formed a triangle where it met the ceiling. So I'm there measuring everything up, and doing trig to calculate all the angles involved before making the cuts. It was taking me a long ass time but I didn't know any other way to do it. Eventually the foreman came in to see how I was doing. He was shocked to see how little progress I made, and at the trig I had scribbled over the walls (with my carpenters pencil!). Then he held up the 2x4's, eyeball the angles, and then make the cuts. His cuts were just as accurate as mine, but he did them in a fraction of the time. It would have taken me all day to do what he did in 30 minutes.

And I lost track of the number of times that the foreman would bring the architect in to approve of changes in the design. The architect would create some overly complex solution, and the foreman would think of a more practical (easier and/or cheaper to build) solution.

Applied knowledge can trump knowledge of fundamentals.

That said, I sure looked forward to getting back to school by the end of each summer!