You find the forum discussions on heise to be fun? My brain starts to ache when I read their forum, never ever have I seen such a childish forum (I'm serious; and I'm online for 17 years now). When they started to link to the latest 5 forum topics for each article I was in agony and despair and wrote them about that, boy was I relieved when they abandoned that "feature". But if you're into trolling and "Fremdschämen" then this really is the forum of choice.

Well, I'm from Germany and can only describe the situation here, but "bonus" discs really are pretty standard for a long time now. Especially with computer and gaming magazines, although some have abandoned them for online content.

For example, Linux magazines often provide a disc with the software that is reported about in the magazine, and often they're also bootable (rescue systems, latest Debian, whatever) which comes in very handy in case you're system broke down and thus can't get online (happened to me once a few years ago). Other computer magazines' discs have demos, free software and drivers but I've also seen them provide movies (I have no idea why). Luckily the notorious AOL discs have vanished ;-) A noteworthy example of a really useful bonus disc is from the popular computer magazine c't: about once a year it provides Knoppicilin, now called Desinfec't which is a Linux Live-CD with content to fix your Windows system: it comes with a few virus scanners (latest version: the commercial scanners Avira, BitDefender, Kaspersky and the free ClamAV) and always support reading and writing NTFS partitions.

Gaming magazines also put these discs to good use as some of them put video reviews of games on their discs and that really is useful additional content as often two or three screenshots printed in a magazine just can't transport the experience of a game. Of course the PC targeted magazines also have game demos.

From the article:

I wonder when this will finally be solved. Previously, the lag was blamed on poor hardware. With this beast, that excuse really does not hold at all anymore.

I do have a ZFS setup of currently 6 disks and I really recommend buying server-grade HDDs, unless you have set up a monitoring system that tells you whenever a HDD is failing so you can buy a new one.

Until half a year ago I used normal USB HDDs that you can buy everywhere. My experience was that they simply aren't meant to be always on and fail pretty soon. I usually had a failed HDD once every quarter year. It drove me mad. Almost one year ago I started using these HDD docks where you can put two 2,5" or 3,5" HDDs into and bought HDDs that where labeled for server use. After half a year they still ran fine, so each time a normal USB HDD failed I replaced it with another dock. Haven't had a single failure since then. Nice bonus: double the amount of HDDs I can connect to the server (speed isn't so much an issue as space in my case). The solution with these docks with better HDDs costs more at first but turns out to be cheaper in the long run.

Maybe he has a girlfriend and doesn't want to lose his homemade porn. I like mine and want them to be safe, too ;-)

You didn't get the memo ? That's out a loooong time ago already.

Somehow, I don't expect this to create the same outrage as back when Apple did something similar...

I also find it totally amazing that Konrad Zuse's Z3 is always and consistently omitted by americans when it comes to determine which one was the first real computer. My guess is most of them simply don't know about the Zuse and the Z3. It's quite sad, because the achievements of this man are astounding.

Yup, the processor was alright... Intel's Linux drivers were not. Just to enable the embedded ethernet driver I had to compile in a whopping 1MB of driver madness from Intel. On a system where the kernel itself was only 600kB. And where we only had 16MB NOR flash for storage. Hurray. I have never seen such a shit before, it looked like they implemented their own kernel besides the kernel.