If you had actually read your parent's post you'd see that he was responding to "It would seem that this does not actually inconvenience their customers at all right?" in which case he was correct in saying that it does inconvenience him, as a customer that pays for Apple's OS, when they disallow or require a hack to install it on an Atom CPU.

Unfortunately I haven't found any OS that can handle upgrades well for everybody. The problem is that as time progresses, little hacks and tweaks here and there are applied, as well as a random bug that results in undesired behavior, and the result is that your OS is far enough away from what would be considered a "vanilla" install, and the upgrade fails to complete as expected. I imagine that if you were to install a default 8.04 you could probably upgrade all the way to 9.10 without many issues.

It's not bloated, hardware has just been updated. It makes no sense to continue developing for decade-old hardware when almost nobody uses it. If you're looking to run linux on it, you certainly can, take a gander at http://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs and put together exactly what you want, using absurdly low amounts of disk space and memory.

If you want a desktop distro that's pre-configured, go back in time and find an old version that was created specifically for that hardware's era.

Ryan Gordon needs to mind his own business. Keep your binaries and shit in OS X, we have source code to compile from which means that we can run it on any platform without requiring larger binaries, thanks!

Take a look at the nvidia ION platform. On newegg you can find a variety of motherboards with built in atom CPUs that require no heatsink fan and HDMI/VGA/DVI output to output to whatever your heart desires. If you can manage to find some of the components laying around your house (perhaps the hard drive) and pick up the case and PSU you could easily accomplish this for under $300. I'm putting together a NAS box using the ikea emu tin as a case and 3x1TB drives for about $360. It'll use about 30-40W, depending on the efficiency of the PSU. http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DEPA=0&Order=BESTMATCH&Description=ionitx&x=0&y=0

No easier than working in any other team. It happens at my job and none of our software is open source. There are a million reasons why you can shove the work off on somebody else; I get it pushed onto me from some lazy developers.

Thanks for playing, though!

Right, like flash. I'd love to take advantage of it, but since adobe gives me a gimped pile of shit instead of what they give the windows users this is what I'm forced to use. I don't really care anyway, flash is the scum of the web, contaminating it with its proprietary (and thus anti-web-friendly) format for delivering videos which could easily be done with the <video> tag. Just sayin'.

Most software ships explicitly without any warranty and says that it has no responsibility for lost data or corruption and such, wouldn't this negate any liability?

Interesting, sound is one of the last things I've ever found to have issues. Nvidia's drivers? Yes. Adobe's flash? Absolutely. Sound? Typically not. This includes when I sit in #ubuntu and help, and also for the people I've migrated to Ubuntu from OS X and windows (all of which have made a great transition and almost never call me as opposed to how it was when they ran the former OSes). To be fair, though, ymmv, and I can certainly believe that you're having issues. Simply pointing out that in my experience it's not very common.

I can't say much for windows, but I can say that one possible solution would be to put a key on a pendrive, don't mark it as such, and require that the pen drive be in in order to decrypt the data. If the system is booted without the drive then begin a wipe, shredder works great for ensuring a very clean drive.

Not only that but Linux != Unix, not really sure how that conclusion can be drawn :-/

You are in no way required to be polite or even talk to a cop. He may be nicer to you, and may choose not to exert his right to detain you to question you, which would be beneficial, but that doesn't mean being an ass is illegal or even wrong. Especially when he was being fucked with for doing nothing wrong.

Time Warner signed me up for cable internet @ USD$25/month. 6 months later, they upped it to USD$40/month. Same deal.

[dmsuperman@blitzkrieg:~]type tracert tracert is /usr/bin/tracert Troll somebody else or get a life -_-

Not only that, but if the issue requires you to scroll or click to show you the bug then you're SOL. Personally I run a VM for IE6, a VM for IE7 (only because I've found MultipleIE to not always accurately represent what the end user uses), and Firefox in one of the VMs. I have outrageous amounts of RAM to play with, though. At work we have a couple fairly decent windows machines running remote desktop that the lot of us remote desktop into to view the pages, for the 15 or so of us it works quite well.