Do you use this on Linux/ZFS/Fuse or OpenSolaris? If you are doing it on Linux, I am curious on how that stacks up to ... say OpenFiler.

@ScytheBlade1, Slitaz needs you ;)

I hope the kernel gurus focus on power. With the nearly double battery performance of Win7 X64 on my laptop as compared to Jaunty X64, I am really having trouble getting people to move to Linux.

'tis the time of horizontal scaling - lets make things more power efficient please

Isnt the Smoke library a good starting point for your effort?

I havent worked with either, however it sounds (http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/427) quite interesting in its goals. I am speculating that Smoke was never seriously used for Python (instead it focussed on Ruby), because of the momentum behind PyQT.

However, given that it can interoperate with any scripting language (http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Languages/Smoke) - isn't it a good starting point ?

http://github.com/thephred/kdebindings/tree/35ba8e5eac62b1e7ab52ac439ea158963ece089b/smoke

The Droid Pro fonts are non-free. Droid fonts (as used on Android) are licensed under Apache Public License.

I've always recommended Droid fonts for all your linux desktop font needs. This is the font that was released by Google for its Android OS and is available for free. It's a gorgeous font on the Desktop!

It is the first thing I do when I install a clean machine - use Droid fonts and turn on subpixel hinting.

i have managed to get meetings to Top-3 VC firms, using OpenOffice PDF export. Note that I used them for both plans as well as presentations - PDF does work on full-screen presentation mode beautifully. I dont use animations for VC presentations anyway.

I actually deliver my presentations from my Ubuntu laptop *exclusively* using PDF's. I have had the accident of moving around a picture from the presentation once and I could not get the placement back (undo :( ) and it didnt look too good.

Also pdf's have the advantage of printing exactly the way they look - on a mac or windows (VC's dont use linux).

The mom and pops of this world only care about getting on the internet and emailing their kids or looking at a few photos and watching youtube. Give me sound and wireles out-of-the-box and i'll be happy. And contrary to what you might believe, it is NOT there yet. Check out the number of sound issues that a Thinkpad R series has on Ubunty Jaunty and you would know.

The problem here is the way this intelligence framework is going to work vis-a-vis the Pak Military and ISI (intelligence services). It will almost be given, that there will be some sort of operational authority given to Pakistan - what is, however, unclear is the way it can be (mis)used to spy on Indian troop movements on the LOAC (Line of Actual Control - border between India and Pak). Given the terrorist attacks of 26-11, on Mumbai, and the diplomatic as well as military sabre -rattling taking place, it will be very interesting to see how the US handles these operations on Pak soil.

I would say learn VHDL first - there is a reason for this. VHDL is more stricter in checking for constraints, which has a true basis in hardware. For example, you cannot read from an output in VHDL, while you can read from outputs in Verilog2K. Also, all the synthesizers (these are the compilers from say Xilinx , and if you move to ASIC design, from Synopsys, etc.) are much more lenient on Verilog - for example assigning to the same wire cannot happen twice (essentially meaning HDL is single static assignment) - in Verilog it is allowed and can generate a multiple driver netlist, leading to a "U" situation. If you are starting up - I would strongly suggest VHDL - if you are working on stuff, I would say Verilog is much easier. However, it depends on Europe vs USA as well (with a preference for VHDL vs Verilog)

Graphite is an open-source technology, designed for the specific purpose of non-Roman fonts with complex behaviors like contextual shaping, etc.
Unfortunately, the default font rendering toolkit in Linux, Pango is not a smart-font technology.
However, the pango-graphite library supports the smartfont technology if fonts are authored with the appropriate tables.

I think that people need to share their experiences with designing smart fonts. This way, more projects know what are their options.

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Calibre, which was also featured on Lifehacker sometime back.
It is based on PyQT (as well as dateutil, mechanize, lxml, BeautifulSoup) . They even have a CoverFlow like interface which is pretty good. I suppose it is usable on Win, Lin and Mac.
You have to provide a login/password to librarything (or a few other alternatives) and you can then search and tag for the book's metadata and cover images from these sources automagically.
I personally also use them to archive my PDF's that I download from the internet, tag them, specify authors and other metadata (incidentally, most of the papers that people create from latex do not have any metadata).
I see the developers pushing out a release every week, so it is under pretty active development. I dont know if there is a plan to integrate any indexing features in it, but I suppose the developers are open to it.