While I agree that the new features are silly and a thinly veiled attempt at capitalizing upon the public, shall we all remember that when we post things on Facebook, we are voluntarily using a free service on the Internet? At any point we are all free to delete our account, ignore the parts we don't like, or otherwise not participate in it as a social networking site.

Shit, we may even decide to go outside, into the Big Blue Room and talk to actual people, face to face!

Unfortunately I'm all too aware of this.

20-30? I wish. For me it's more like 40-60. And after talking to many of my fellow classmates, I'm fortunate. At least I don't have children.

As a late 30s guy who has a 21 year old woman asleep in his bed right now, I can't decide which is the first thing I should say:

1) It doesn't take drugs, just a charming personality to win them over.
2) There's a smoking hot 21 year old in my bed right now, and I'm up at 2:00am reading old articles on Slashdot.

eh...

I was trying to remember the last time I built a linux kernel. It's going to be somewhere in the early 2.6.x series, on Debian Sid. Even in those early days I didn't really notice a difference in performance (unless I was compiling in drivers for specific hardware). The kernel image was smaller, and I knew that that was better, but other than that it all ran about the same. I almost wonder if the performance "increase" I saw back in the 2.2 days was all in my head now. I used to see some performance differences in compiled FreeBSD kernels on my really old boxes (300mhz K6-II with 128MB), but I think the differences have gotten smaller and smaller since 4.x days.

Like Wonko says, it's not a huge bit of effort to build a kernel. But I don't really see a reason to do it. I should give it a shot just for old time's sake, heh.

Back in the Middle Ages (late 1990s through about 2004) I remember us all getting excited for new kernel releases, and then all rushing to download the source and build it. (By 'us' i mean myself and local geek friends, as well as our cohorts on various IRC channels).

Nowadays with auto-configuring, rolling release desktop distributions being the norm, is kernel building now only done in server room environments and for non-PC hardware?

This doesn't matter much, I'm just curious.

"Atari Wants To Reinvent Pong" is incorrect. It should be:

"Foreign company that owns the Atari trademark wants someone else to reinvent Pong for them, because they blew it trying to reboot a few of Atari's classic titles themselves."

My only concern for this is that Steam (one of the major forces in PC gaming) moving this direction will discourage Desktop PC game development. Instead of creating games for the latest PC hardware, developers will focus on the 'sure thing' of the Steam Box. We all know the difference in graphics, processing and gameplay between PC and console games of the same title.

The specs of the Steam Box are respectable now (my main PC doesn't have an i7, for instance) but in a few years its specs will be merely 'ok', and I'm not optimistic about being able to upgrade video components, ram or processing capabilities on it without major headaches.

This is one of a series of articles where I've seen that the British can't do math and have trouble with spelling, grammar and apostrophe use. The worst part though, is that most of them end with "at least we're doing much better than those in the United States."

It worries me how bad the U.S. is getting. I should get out more, but now I'm worried about what I'll see.