BioGen seems like a good name for a conference that generates 20k infections!

Wish I had mod points; I can't believe you were modded down to zero w/o even a rebuttal offered. I would like to hear one, because I don't see anything in your rant that is untrue.

By porting Windows tools to Win-Linux and encouraging Windows users to use them instead of more common Linux tools, MS ensures that people are used to the Windows versions and expect them to be there, so that when they get on any other Linux distro, they get frustrated and think it stinks because it lacks basic system tools, and they never want to use anything besides Microsoft's, because it has everything they need.

It wasn't a meteor -- it was obviously a spaceship piloted by a teenage boy showing off for his friends!

My opinions, having lived in AZ, CA, & WA, and visiting MA (and the rest of the 48 states) is: I totally agree with you on CA being aggressive but more skilled on average (similar in Seattle compared to the rest of the state). I found MA, though, esp. around Boston, to be filled with a bunch of absolute nuts, totally insane, illogical. The whole week I was there, there were constant accidents and I wasn't surprised after seeing the things that people pulled. In CA they'll kill you for personal gain; in MA they'll kill you so they can be the first to go over a cliff. I talked to a guy who used to live there, and he said "Yeah, the rest of NE has a name for 'em: Massholes."

In WA? It's largely the Oregonians. It seems more even now, but when I first moved up here, I quickly learned that if someone was going to enter a freeway at 40MPH and cut everyone off as they move over, that there was an 80% chance the car had OR plates. I nicknamed it the OCLF - Oregon Center Lane Fetish -- because they simply *had* to drive in the middle of 3 lanes, would kill to get there, and if forced to move, would do anything to get back to it ASAP. A few take the left lane, but the majority fight for the center. And when you mix the "never seen more than 2 lanes" bumpkins from OR w/ the maniacs from CA, yeah, no wonder the accident rate in the NW went way up over a couple of decades; they just couldn't adjust to each other's way of driving.

If I wanted to work from home but had a PHB who insisted that I couldn't be as productive there as in the office, then something like this came along and forced him to let me work from home for a while, I would be tempted to work extra hard at home so that I could show a productivity increase to "prove" that letting the arrangement continue after the crisis was a good idea.

> even replying to your comment might get me pregnant

LOL Don't worry; I have a rubber on my keyboard.

Yeah, backups can be big. I don't back up a significant amount of data online (unlike our two locations at work that replicate databases and VMs in near realtime and suck huge amounts of bandwidth); long-term archives of big stuff are maintained the old-fashioned way w/ a rotating set of media with a portion kept offsite. (I also do semi-offsite exchanges* w/ my in-laws whose property corners mine; when they moved in 18 years ago, they got power & phone from my property so while the trench was open I dropped a fiber optic line in it, and we have a nice fast intranet.) I do host nightly VM backups for one of my clients, but I've got the disk images arranged so that usually not much changes and the rsync algorithm can deal with it pretty efficiently.

*I like that arrangement; it's a nice compromise between convenience and safety for a middle-tier of backups between local and the off-site storage. MOST fires aren't going to take out both of our homes; MOST thefts won't hit both of them, and with limited types of traffic through the firewall between us, MOST accidents & network/security breaches won't nail both. Both families get protection beyond local backups without any inconvenience and without clogging the DSL bottleneck.

Getting my mail server VM out of the house and into a hosted data center helped a little; while some operations take more bandwidth with it offsite, it's more than made up by other things (emails that are delivered but never read; friends, mail to/from family, and organizations that are hosted on the same server).

I'm not a gamer anymore, and most of the shows we watch are stored locally instead of streamed, being downloaded at most once. I use a package proxy so that most OS updates downloaded for our computers or those that I have on the bench for clients are only downloaded once. A couple of times a year, for a big upload/download project, I'll cheat and use the Internet connection at work (before the virus I'd usually go in once a week) and carry it between home & work using a portable hard drive. ("Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.")

I do miss the 70% data savings that my proxy server used to provide before everything on the web went dynamic+https.

Thanks for making me feel good -- I can eek a whopping *6* Mbps out of my line, so if I really tried I could slam that 1TB! :-)

From what I've seen of other people's use, so much of the bandwidth is wasted with carelessness because it's "free". (How many movies and music streams do you need playing simultaneously when you're not even home? Wait, why are you even streaming that -- you have a copy of it!)

Our household's typical usage is only up to about 40GB/month*, now -- and that's for a family of 15, with me whose job (and side-job) is working remotely, 4 kids taking college classes with lots of videos, and a lot of video conferences the last couple of months.

*We hit 80 one month when my YouTube-addicted father-in-law was here and we had another family of 3 living in our apt.

if I were to watch Netflix for hours a day in hi-def it would suck it up, but I have better things to do. I guess I've always budgeted my bandwidth and it would honestly take some work for me to blow through that much data, even with a fast connection. I dream of a faster connection, but the need for more than 1Mbps is pretty "bursty", not 24 hours a day.

I also only use a couple hundred MB of cell data a month -- except last year when we took a cross-country trip and I had to work on the road so got equipment for 3 carriers and occasionally the whole family was using cell for school, etc. when we didn't have Wi-Fi somewhere; then I averaged 3GB/month on the cell networks. THAT took careful bandwidth planning.

> There is no "must digest everything" clause to data

Not that there won't be an attempt. If movie studios can ever get away with claiming that it's illegal to manipulate viewed movies to censor unwanted parts, because it alters the artistic intent and the producer has a right to have his movie viewed as was intended or not at all; I don't see much to prevent web-based distributors from making a similar claim. Add a token amount of stuff that makes doing so harder, and now suddenly they can accuse you of circumventing protection and suggest jail time, you hardened criminal, you!

9.9 meters of code? Is that at 6 or 8 lines per inch?

What they meant is "most smartphones used by people who will jump at the chance to spend more money on whatever new thing we announce don't have headphone jacks"

Will those be better or worse than the unlimited-featured cables?

Those Turks. Everyone knows that the Russians discovered America first!
    - Pavel Chekov

You may be 100% correct -- but all the flame wars over the many different environments prove than an awful lot of people disagree with you.

Some people likewise think that PCs are unnecessary because they have apps on their phone.

So is pi, but I don't usually want to base an array index on it! ;-)

(Seriously, though, I think I've preferred 0-based more often than 1-based in my 35 years of programming.)