Potato I have

France was late to the internet, partly due to an already established online services network called Minitel. But lately it seems they’ve become quite a leader, at least in high-bandwidth offerings. My DSL provider’s plan is 30€/month and includes a connection of up to 20Mbit (in practice I get about 10Mbit), a VoIP solution that has free unlimited calls in France and is about 1.80€/hour to California, and >200 TV channels (>80 free, including the new digital-over-airwaves channels). The satellite content providers are now delivering over DSL too. Stability and service are not rock-solid — and they’ve been downright nightmarish for some — but I’ve had a pretty good experience overall. Connection-only, high-bandwidth (20Mbit) offerings are about 15€/month, from multiple providers.

My provider has been aggressive with new services, and I especially like this free one; it’s based on the free and open-source (GNU GPL) VLC media player project, and means I can stream video from any computer on my LAN (Mac and PCs for me, but most OSes are supported) to my TV without any additional hardware. No computer in the living room. DVDs, mpgs, etc all presented as playlists which can be selected with the TV remote. Well, any multimedia can be streamed, but video is the interesting one for me.

Tim Bray considers unswitching (from Apple, rather than to it); the issues he mentions include lack of corporate transparency (he uses the word ‘infofascism’), mediocre laptop, and inability to run Sun products.

Since my personal ‘tecosystem’ could always use a little more diversity, I’m not wanting to switch but to add an Apple. In this light, Tim’s post doesn’t make me pause, but I’ll dig for other unswitch stories out of curiosity. Price is the classic complaint, but the transparency issue Tim gripes about is an interesting Apple vulnerability.

I’m still a bit undecided about where to enter the Mac line, and I don’t need this kind of distraction in the next few months, so it will be Summer before I bite, if ever. That comfortably accommodates Tiger even if the rumor is really a rumor, and not a crack of light that somehow slipped out of the box.

All of them. I like this approach, and my ripping will probably do this from now on. Saves me trying to figure out all the encoding choices at rip time–I can have large AND small files, and easily apply whatever encoders or listening experience I have tomorrow.

slashdot had a thread on choosing raid; buried within was a decent overview to the different raid types.