The number one program most people that I deal with use as their 'deal breaker' reason for not converting over to a LINUX based OS is Quickbooks. Both personal and business users have too much of their financial history already invested into these programs, and would have to either re-enter a massive amount of history to bring any other solution up to speed, or they would have to switch over to a new LINUX based software solution but still have to run a Windows machine to access their past data, which is obviously a stupid option as well. Although at one time there were vague rumors of a LINUX version of Quickbooks in the future, it's obvious that now the preferred 'fix' is to sell everyone their monthly cloud based accounting instead.

If I am so ignorant, what does that say about you, that keeps this dialog going?

And somebody else apparently needs to get laid more frequently....

Imagine that. All that diatribe, and yet my comment still got a response from you anyway.

If a system programmed by a student in the 80's has worked adequately for this long, it's too bad the Grand Rapids Public School System didn't learn anything from this. There is no doubt that instead of putting 1.5 -2 million dollars of taxpayer funds into a replacement, they could instead replace this system with some additional student programming effort and some Raspberry PI units, at a minuscule fraction of that kind of expense. I'm glad I am no longer a taxpayer in the Grand Rapids area, this kind of spending of taxpayers' funding used to make me insane.

Here's what Comcast said in their official press release-
“Today, we move on. Of course, we would have liked to bring our great products to new cities, but we structured this deal so that if the government didn’t agree, we could walk away,"

Here's what Comcast didn't say in their official press release, but should have-
Now that we no longer have to 'play nice' to help get the merger approved, you can all expect big price increases in our monopolistic markets, reinstated data caps with BIG upcharges for those of you that stream the bulk of your video content instead of paying us for cable access, and further obfuscation of that silly agreement we made to provide low cost internet access for low income families!

We are still the 6000 lb gorilla of the industry and we will do anything we please. Just try to stop us!

"an incumbent who spent decades running a private business"
a) Unsuccessfully? - Why would I vote for a failed businessperson to represent me in government?
b) Successfully? - I would question the motives of anyone who is successful in ANY endeavor that would give that up to go in to politics...

"candidate who has spent decades getting elected to one political office after another"
Precisely what I am advocating. By forcing 'career' politicians to have to keep getting reelected to different offices, you stop them from becoming entrenched into a long term political position that encourages the current "influence for sale to the highest bidder" situation that constitutes modern "politics as usual"

I'll be voting in this election the same way I have been voting for the past 12 years. I'm a member of the anti-incumbent party. So if you are currently IN office, I am voting AGAINST you. As the ousted incumbent, this will offer the opportunity to:

1) Go out and get a real job

2) Run for office again after you've discovered what it means to try and EARN a living in this country.

3) If lucky enough to get re-elected, try to remember that your obligations to your voting constituents is supposed to take priority over granting political favors to campaign contributors.

Voting against all incumbents is kind of like "Informal Term Limits". Politicians will never pass the laws required to institute mandatory term limits. So the voters have to institute them at the voting booth instead. If the PRESIDENT can only serve 8 years, no one else should be able to serve in the same office for any longer than that.

We went to local HD programming with an OTA antenna and MythTV setup a few years ago and it has worked out just fine. Sure there were a few cable shows that were sacrificed. Guess what? Many could be viewed with various online options, and those that couldn't were gradually replaced by new 'favorites' from the available OTA signals. Not that it's entirely as much as a money saver as it should be. Comcrap in my market charges a PREMIUM RATE for internet only service (about 70-80 % of the rate for the basic Internet/TV bundles). They can see the writing on the walls, cable TV is doomed as a revenue stream, so they are shifting their pricing structures so that Internet access will be their primary cash cow in the future.

We actually added a very "limited basic" cable TV/Internet bundle back into our service this past year because the bundle saves $30 a month over Internet Only service. I did not let them reconnect all of the internal house wiring back to cable, which I had completely converted over to use the OTA antenna system. I only let them add the one outlet in the living room for cable. The cable service is provided from a deliberately crippled digital box that will only output in SD resolution unless we pay for additional upgraded service. But to be honest, since our OTA setup provides excellent HD programming, we don't care. The toddler happily watches SD cartoons on the cable box some times, and the rest of the time, we watch great HD programming on our own antenna system in every room in the house.

The MythTV setup allows TONS more HD recording capacity than any cable company provided DVR, with viewing options in every room in the house, plus the ability to start watching in one room and resume watching in another, multiple viewings of the same recordings in different rooms at the same time, and a whole host of other features. The cost of the OTA antenna setup, the MythTV backend, the hard drives for 3-5TB of storage, and muliple MythTV frontend machines was not inconsquential. But MythTV can use older hardware effectively enough that the entire cost of this switch over has been entirely recovered from the reduced cable bills. And it can be done in stages. The old cable system did not have access to DVR functions in every room, but evolution/expansion of the MytHTV system provides all of the functions that the previous cable company DVR system offered and much, much more, in every room in the house.

If/when they try to bump the rate on the Limited Basic cable/Internet bundle, we'll happily ditch the cable to go back to Internet only service. But as long as we can save money with the bundle ($300-400/yr) we'll keep signing up for a service we barely use. And the cable company gets to doctor their numbers to make it look like they are not losing as many cable tv subscribers as they really are losing to their stockholders

My eyesight would never accept trying to read on a screen this small.
But I have used this same approach for creating a dedicated device to assist with tracking my diabetes.
A used $20 phablet + android diabetes tracking app = great diabetes tracking device

One possible reason why this is not offered is because it is a service that already IS offered by various cable TV providers.
I suspect that the studios probably don't want Netflix and other similar providers to cut into those profits, nor deal with any possible backlash from the all-to-powerful cable giants.

Not a problem, I moved my free DNS services to No-IP a couple of years ago.

I just completed a migration of 3 machines for a client.
1 XP machine was replaced with a different machine running Vista Home Premium.Their UPS shipping data was migrated to the new machine, as well as updating the software.
1 XP machine was upgraded to a fresh install of Windows 7 Professional.This machine also had to have a 'forced upgrade' from Quickbooks
1 XP machine was replaced with a re-certified Dell running Windows 7 Professional.
And since they had a certain piece of software they could not do without on that last machine, software that would not run/install on Windows 7, I set up a fresh XP install, fully patched and updated, on a SFF machine dedicated to that one task, which has no Internet or network access.
In the process of the migration, I also discovered torrent software installed on one machine by an as yet unidentified employee. All machines are now locked down to prevent unauthorized installation of any type of software.

Just sit tight until these are perfected, and then buy a couple of dozen-

Next-gen “Archival Disc” will squeeze 1TB of data onto optical discs
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets...

Either that, or install a duplicate RAID to back up the first one....

'nuff said!