/.'ers you disappoint me.

I cancelled my Directv service a few months ago, too. Looks like a lot of other people have: http://www.tvpredictions.com/tivo082709.htm ... 139,000 last quarter. At $70 a pop, that's almost $10M. I, too, and using Hulu, Netflix and torrents to replace the incredible over-priced services that Directv was offering. I didn't even mention they swapped my broken TiVo box for a really crappy DVR. I replaced the old rig with a Mac Mini running Plex, and I love it (though it isn't quite as nice as the old TiVo experience... a lot more manual steps, for torrents).

I have DOCSIS 2.0. 3.0 is not in my area yet. Will be by the end of the year. I already checked with several people, including the install guy.

I got it recently. Yes, it's more expensive (16 Mbps up and 2.5 Mbps down, 5 static ips is $100/mo), but it's much faster than the advertised speed. I get 6 Mbps up, and I have no trouble seeding my torrents.

That's a gross oversimplification. People don't kill themselves over their job. They kill themselves because they are mentally ill. The job wasn't the cause. The lack of proportion and perspective was the cause. The job was incidental.

In this particular case, the guy's mother and sister committed suicide. There are much higher rates of suicide among people who have relatives who have also committed suicide. That, with the isolation he appears to have suffered from, the job is looking not that significant, at most some sort of trigger.

First, this is bullshit. It's an idle threat.
Second, this is bullshit. MS has been hugely successful and will likely continue to be, even more so if they get their (his) head out of their ass. This would put a minor dent profits, and would be good for the rest of us. MS should pay their fair share.

I got a mini and installed XBMC and uTorrent (which sucks on the Mac, btw, but Vuze is just too bloated). One issue is my son, who watches most of his shows in another room on another TV, away from the mini. The Slingbox/Slingcatch combo isn't that cheap, not too far from another mini. Another is that as soon as I turn off the service, what I have on my DVR will be inaccessible. So, I have to download or watch all that is there before I call them.

I'm also using ted (http://www.ted.nu/) as a poor man's DVR for torrents. It is not that good (it downloads torrents from private trackers whick never go anywhere, missing downloads that I can easily find on mininova, etc). It does have a nice interface, so there's hope that it will get better over time.

Rant on uTorrent on the Mac: doesn't stop at pre-defined share ratio, just keeps seeding forever. Has a bug which pushes CPU use up to 100%. These bugs are 5+ months old. The perils of arrogant developers (they delete cries for patches on their forums) on a closed source project.

Right after the dot bomb bust, many of the open source project I was following gained a lot of momentum. All those techies out of work, what're they going to do, sit around and not use their computer?

I get them a couple of times a week. They're robo calls, with the usual "press 1 to ..." and they all start with the claim to help you with your CC rates and that this is "your last chance".

Once, I played them. I pressed 1. Said I was interested. Was asked if I had "at least $4000 in CC debt." Once I passed that test, I was handled off to the closer, a really slick asshole who asked for my CC#'s. I stalled. He waited. I acted dumb and said I'd look for my statements. I just set down the phone. 10 minutes later I hung up. I immediately got a call back. At first, he thought I accidentally hung up, but I hung up again. He called back again and before I hung up again I hear "you'll be sorry..." The next 5 rings were people that asked to be taken off their list. I had to take the phone off the hook for 30 minutes.

Neither worked on my 18 yr old CVS repo (that was populated with 7 yr old RCS files). What I did find was fromcvs. I found a couple of bugs, with the author fixed very quickly. It is also fast. My 3.5G CVS repo was converted in about an hour. Both of the others took 10+ hours (and didn't produce usable output). The biggest reason I love it: it allows incremental updates from CVS to GIT. You can run it any number of times and it imports the new stuff. You do need to leave the git repo you are importing into alone (no commits other than the import commits).

I still have more testing to do before we go live, but it's looking very, very nice.