Most of the Dell and IBM servers I've used will let you get to the BIOS/GRUB over a serial console with some configuration, but I've never seen a desktop motherboard that would do it. If you really care about power consumption the easiest route is probably to buy a cheap, low-power itx board that has VGA built in and skip the console altogether. Plus, that way you don't need a laptop to talk to the box, just an old monitor.

Anyone know some tricks to get serial console to work with grub on a desktop mobo?

Well, trading speed for cost. Many supercomputers are about maximum performance and damn the expense, so it may be a reasonable tradeoff. With proper redundancy SSDs and hard disks are equally capable of long-term data integrity.

My perception has been that the cloud services (Amazon, Google, slicehost, mosso, etc) have realistic, sustainable per-unit costs whereas shared hosting outfits tend to have completely unrealistic cost assessments. They count on the fact that most people won't use their full quota because there's no way they could deliver what they promise to every user without ending up WAY in the red.

For my money, I'll stick with cloud services that are metered honestly and transparently.

100% uptime is ridiculously hard to achieve.

I have been using gmail for years and it's still far more useful and reliable than any other competing service I've tried (including paid services!). When they lose some of my email or are totally down for a week, then I will start complaining. But I probably still wouldn't switch.

But then I read this story and got to thinking... Why not make a gigantic net and scoop up all that garbage?

And put it where? Texas?

Reminds me of the uproar over Comcast disconnecting users with excessive bandwidth usage, except here we went from clear, obvious limit to unclear, ill-specified limit.

Instead of a fixed limit of 30% now there will be an arbitrary install base beyond which comcast becomes liable to antitrust investigations.

Agreed. Look at these particularly stupid statements:

(1) "devise technology that makes it difficult or impossible for people to be defrauded"

So some sort of mind control/constraint device for people then? Ha, ha.

(2) "At the moment we have drivers licences for cars, and cars are very dangerous machines. Computers are also quite dangerous"

Haven't seen anyone run over by a computer recently. I wonder what is the death toll caused by poor "driving" of a computer these days?

Keep in mind that is only ~3x per year because 3^6 = 729. If Moore's law holds with a 2x every 18 months that would be 16x in 6 years 570/16 = 35.652. The sixth root of 35 is 1.8. So they only have to improve the architecture by ~2x every year and ride Moore's law.

That's Adobe's problem, not Ubuntu's. Videos in every player other than Flash will work fine.

Filing a lawsuit against an individual or small business (ie, any entity that is not a corporation) who has not harmed you is kind of like walking up to a stranger on the street and punching him in the face. You'll probably get away with it a few times, but eventually you'll pick the wrong person and get what's coming to you.

The plaintiffs should be lucky this guy is content to put a 'strongly worded' letter on his website.

Pwned! Power nazi say... no electricity for j00!

Good point about the botnets. But what I think this will really enable is HD programming on-demand, assuming the backhaul links are up to snuff.

Well, cyber ATTACKS might be a bit overstated. I've been following the news fairly closely and as far as I can tell there's not been much aside from cyber VANDALISM. No major infrastructure has been destroyed, hospital operations have not been impeded, etc... It's just government and related websites that have been defaced and while that can interfere with productivity to some extent, it's hardly akin to warfare.

That was a joke! A play on words!

Seriously though, caches are good. Worrying about credit card numbers being cached is as bad as promoting security through obscurity. We should be moving to a system that doesn't rely on "secret numbers," but instead makes use of multiple factors from the time-tested triumvirate of "something you have," "something you know," and "something you are." Something you know alone just isn't good enough for this day and age.

Google is just doing what Google does.

Cashless is old hat. What we really need is a cacheless society.