I don't think most people want to control their own devices. For home users a computer is an appliance that they will use for a handful of tasks. As long as the hardware does those things, they don't really care how open it is. To use a car analogy, the software in your car likely makes the air to fuel ratios inaccessible to tinker with. Most people don't care as long as the car runs right. For the people that do care, there are after market engine management systems and even cars that have those things directly accessible.

I'm also not convinced that all computing will end up locked down. Even with a fairly dystopian view of the future, there are two things I think will prevent it: 1) Server grade hardware. It's one thing to lock down a consumer grade device but business will not stand for a locked down server and I can't imagine vendors thinking they would. 2) Hobby markets. Things like the Raspberry Pi and similar devices are going to keep getting better, cheaper and more common. The vendors of those types of hardware have no incentive to lock down the hardware. I understand that at the moment not all the drivers for these devices might be open source but, this is still a fairly new market and I think going forward, a lot of interesting things are going to happen with these types of devices.

That's completely incorrect. Modern CPU power savings uses a strategy called "race to idle". The deeper idle states (C-states) are so power efficient that the best power savings comes from doing everything as fast as possible and then returning to the deepest idle state. Waiting for information to come back from a spinning disk likely prevents the CPU from getting into the deepest idle states. If you are going to read a gigabyte of data, it's more power efficient to do it as fast as possible.

Even if you are running a 32-bit OS on a machine with 4GB of RAM, you'll need to use a PAE kernel to take advantage of all the RAM. Some of the 4GB address space (usually around 400-500MB) will be reserved for things like PCI-Express so, 10% or more of your RAM is likely to be unaddressable for applications by a non-PAE kernel. This isn't an issue when you get down to 3GB or less though.

Home theaters are generally setup in small enough rooms that even a 5.1 system is very immersive. Having upgraded from 5.1 to 7.1 to 9.2 in the last year, the immersiveness has improved but, it's incremental enough that I can't imagine and wouldn't even encourage most people bothering with it. Having extra speakers on the z and y axises (height and wide channels) will make some movie scenes more impressive but, in general, it's ambient noises that come out of those channels and, if you already have a properly setup and calibrated 5.1 system with even moderately priced speakers, most of the time you won't notice much of a difference.

As for having speakers on the ceiling, that's completely pointless for a home theater. Having height channels (PLIIz/DSX/DTS:Neo) a few feet above your front speakers is sufficient to give your ear the impression that things are happening directly above you. Just like side surrounds can play phase tricks on your ears to make you think something is happening directly behind you, height channels can make things sound like they are directly above you. And this technology is already available on mid-priced 7.1 receivers.

I've used 12.5"-13.3" laptops for my development machines for years and you are exactly right. The key is setting up your environment to make the most of your screen realestate. By default most OS installs and applications are designed to be familiar/pretty with little thought to maximizing viewing space on a small screen. There are plenty of things you can do to maximize your working area: Effective and heavy use of virtual desktops, get rid of unused menu/tool bars, remove window decorations for maximized windows (devilspie), moving tab bars to the side instead of on top, put the task bar in a vertical orientation, learn your keyboard shortcuts, etc.

720 vertical pixels seems very limiting but, if you take some time to setup your environment, you can actually use all 720 of them to as a work area.

The support agreement part is possible but the actual building and installation of a new kernel on Debian/Ubuntu couldn't be easier. With a single command you can build proper .deb packages from the kernel source and with a second command install them complete with grub updates, DKMS updates, etc. I've been doing this for years without problems. The days of breaking your machine with a custom kernel are long gone for modern distros.

The Xen + IOMMU setup is what I use and it works great once you get it setup. Hardware selection is the key to making it less painful to setup. Specifically, if you try to use an nVidia card as the passthrough card, you are in for a world of pain but, an ATI 6800 series is essentially an out of the box experience once you configure the bootloader to block the device from dom0. You'll also need to be careful which distro you use. The Debian flavor of distros do an awesome job of setting up grub to do the Xen magic so, something like Xubuntu 12.04 (haven't tried this setup on 11.10) should be ideal once it's released but, if you use something like Debian 6, you'll end up needing to get Xen 4.1 and a newer kernel (3.1+) to support the PCI passthrough backend. Both of those things are pretty simple to do if you know you need to do them beforehand.

Once you get the basics setup, you'll probably want to pass a few other PCI devices through. If you buy a cheap PCI USB controller, you can pass that through to the VM and then use a KVM to switch between Linux and Windows. If you have a crazy enough motherboard (or secondary cards), you can also passthrough things like one of your onboard NICs and my motherboard even has an LSI SAS controller that passes through just fine (you can't use it for boot devices but, RAID0 WD Raptors run at native speeds in the VM).

It sounds like a big hassle to setup and, if you are going at it completely blind, it definitely is but, once you get it setup, it's rock solid, native performance and no real upkeep at all. I've played things like Dragon Age II and Skyrim at max settings at 1920x1080 and had literally no problems.

I guess I don't know much about the EU parliament but isn't, "the people who elected me are against this" a sufficent reason to vote against it? What's the point in having elected officials if they can't represent the people that elected them?

Why would a "Militant Linux Zealot" buy a laptop with AMD graphics? Support for AMD graphics has always been poor and even the most basic research when buying a machine would turn up this fact. I agree that you are "in a real minority" but, not because you use linux for everything (hell, my parents do that) but because you use linux for everything and purchased the worst possible graphics platform for doing that.

I didn't see anything wrong in that privacy policy. They don't collect any information from the browser extension at all. All of their information collection is opt-in in the form of information you explicitly give them. Except the fact that your IP address might appear in their web server logs if you go to the website. Seems reasonable to me.

I'm really surprised that this comment was modded up. Oracle is responsible for btrfs (negating the "filesystems" argument), Novell was the catalyst for the modern linux composited desktop with compiz/Xgl (negating the X argument), and if I thought about it for more than 10 seconds, I'm sure I could come up with a shitload of other examples where these two companies that you've "cherrypicked" have been a driving force for good in the linux world. I do agree with your sentiment but, you sound bitter for these companies not having contributed to technologies that you don't realise you are using. But, most likely, the have. And in a big way. I'm all for hating companies like Oracle but, hate them for the right reasons.

I'm not so sure. I think this technology might not be useful for the opposite reason.

I've got a 100Mbit/15Mbit DOCCIS 3 line connected to a Linksys E3000 that sits about 10 feet from where I usually use my laptop (5Ghz N) and it's like Internet Nirvana. It's well matched and good hardware with bandwidth that is surprisingly delivered as advertised. However, it's only delivered as advertised because of diligence on my part. Twice now (NEVER reboot your DOCCIS 3 modem), I've been mysteriously bumped down to a 30mbit/5mbit connection. I've called to complain both times and, to my ISPs credit, both times when I've said, "Look, I'm an engineer. I've properly tested the line and it's 30/5", they've immediately put me through to a proper network engineer who, while obviously annoyed, did things like put a large file on a server that was 1-ish hops away and said, "FTP that over and see what you get". I was stunned. And the problems were resolved.

Having said that, most people I know have ISP issued routers and wouldn't even know how to test their connection speed to the router or the internet in general. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that half of them have upgraded to connection speeds that not a single computer in their house can actually achieve over wireless because they are using shitty ISP issued D-Link wireless-g routers that they tuck away in the place least conducive to actually getting a good wireless connection. The ISPs know this and certainly aren't going to start issuing 1Gbit wireless routers that will allow people to actually take advantage of the speeds they are paying for with every device in their house.

This kernel should trickle down to 10.04 LTS as well. One of the big complaints about the 8.04 LTS version was that hardware gets released so rapidly that a 3-5 year old kernel isn't going to support a lot of it. Even right now the Ubuntu 10.10 kernel (2.6.35) is in the 10.04 repos that are enabled by default.

It would pervert the process if it was written in some binding way that the US is a two party system and you must vote one way or the other. I would call this kind of activity a huge boon to the US democratic process. If both the Republicans and Democrats start playing this game and end up with very weak candidates for their parties, it gives a strong third party a better shot at gaining traction. If the political duopoly of American politics were finally broken, the US government might find a way to pull its head out of its ass.

There is a difference between a special effects movie and a "good science" movie. But, there is also a difference between a "good science" movie and a movie that can potentially get kids interested in science and technology. Movies like War Games, Weird Science and Real Genius were probably a big inspiration for many of us 30-somethings to sit down and dig into technology. Even if the initial lure was to hack into the school computers to change your grades, create a super-model genius girlfriend with a scanner or implanting a talking microchip into a jerks tooth. I know those were the reasons I got into computers as a kid and, though I only accomplished some of those goals (I won't enumerate which), I can definitely point at every one of those movies and say, "That movie had a dramatic effect on me as a kid".

In some ways this goes back to the Tron review that was on Slashdot earlier. In the 80's, when computers were magical to most of the population, seeing something like that could have a profound effect on you as a kid. Now, your average teenager has the equivalent of an 80's super-computer sitting in their pocket and, though they don't understand how it works, it's an appliance to them so they also don't care. The magic is gone in a lot of ways. Kids are being raised with technology aimed at the consumer market and I think that makes them somewhat numb to the difference between sci-fi and technology: "If it were possible to do that, I'd be able to find an app for my phone to do it" instead of "Whoa! I wonder if *I* could do that".

(I think at this point I'm supposed to mumble something about my lawn and how kids should stay off it)