Hard drives are ridiculously cheap these days, especially for how much data you are storing. You may wish to consider buying drives from different manufacturers but of the same size to put in a single mirrored set. This way if there is a problem with a particular batch of drives it won't ruin everything.

Weird. I live in Manhattan and lots of people have iPhones.

What a stupid move.

NIH study sections will now perceive Oklahoma State as an institution that isn't prepared to do research that they have been awarded a grant to do. There are plenty of other institutions willing keep their promises; why take a chance on this one?

They'll also have a harder time attracting good faculty who can win grants. Why would a good scientist go to an institution that will arbitrarily stop her research? And why would good scientists who get offers from other institutions choose to stay? That will impact their bottom line.

Not to mention competent biology students will want to go someplace where politics doesn't interfere in their education.

In a sense Apple's contributions to open-source projects are a way to protect their investment. Even under a BSD license, not contributing back upstream is equivalent to forking the project. If they did that they'd have to spend a lot of time and money merging upstream changes down the line, instead of having upstream do the work for free.

Also I'd imagine the sort of engineer who would be able to contribute good code to something like LLVM is not too common, and (s)he would have a strong sense of wanting to give back. To keep people like that, a company needs to make them feel enfranchised.

With any luck major websites will simply stop supporting IE6, no matter how loudly its users complain. Especially when the site does not derive revenue directly from its visitors, why cater to a few who are ruining the experience for the vast majority?

$40 isn't much. I would be perfectly willing to pay $40 for a computer without ads or intrusive tracking rather than $0 for one with those things.

Changing customers' behavior is exactly what advertising and marketing are meant to accomplish. It's just usually aimed at getting people to buy your product. Here, instead of "Buy our $FOO now!" the message is "Don't download our $FOO!". I don't see why I should be angrier about this than about advertising in general.

Their OS, until quite recently, had to work on x86, x86_64, PPC, PPC64, and ARM. Deliberately excluding one particular variant of one of these in a nontrivial way just means they will have to deal with increased complexity in their codebase, because the Hackintosh community is just going to work around it anyway. So it doesn't make business sense to do that.

Apple has had and continues to have many, many opportunities to do stuff in their OS that breaks it for non-Macs. They haven't yet, for good reason.

You have evaluate what this is really worth to you. You can learn just fine with notes you hand-wrote. Will all the effort you'd put into making this electronic really mean you'll learn the material in less time? And you're not seriously going to bring a Wacom tablet to class, are you? You'll look ridiculous.

If you really must, scan and OCR your (neatly) hand-written notes. You'll get enough of the words to be able to search for the concept you need later.

Or, if you don't believe me, just learn TeX markup for equations, and don't worry about getting the syntax 100% right during class. Fix syntax errors and render your notes after class.

I may have missed something, but Nvidia doesn't claim that their driver is open source, only that the tiny kernel interface piece is. On the other hand, Netgear is touting hardware's open-source friendliness, when it reality it isn't. The problem is that Netgear is being extremely disingenuous here.

I had always thought the point of an SLA was for there to be some real, immediate monetary cost for downtime to the provider, which would provide an incentive to make sure their internal processes for ensuring uptime were robust. The payment to customers is just sort of a side effect of this.

Bad analogy. I have both a BlackBerry and iPod, and both sync just fine with my iTunes library using their respective applications. Palm could take the same approach as RIM instead of picking fights with both Apple and the USB folks.

SNOBOL dropped out of high school and ended up working for a car dealership, last I heard. He was always the sleazy sort.

You sound like a sociopath more interested in winning at politics than delivering a good product...but you present an important perspective and good advice because there are many like you in the real world.

But the idiots are apparently the ones who pay the bills, so they get what they want. What's wrong with that?