anand's review -- http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=3531 -- shows that random write performance on a good ssd is still 20x better than the best hdd.

That review also covers the cause of the performance drop as the drive ages that most review don't originally consider. The review covers random reads and writes in a variety of patterns.

can someone comment on the leagility of doing something like this?

an inclined plane !

let me google that for you
oh, wait, that now points to a slashdot post, perhaps if you look down that page you can find someone who has searched it out for you.

you forgot A*) Too expensive ...

isn't it more traditional to use a car analogy?

At the moment every time i re-install FF (probably every 6 months or so) I clear the addblock list.
The first few websites i visit inevitably have a few animated adds which get an immediate blanket block.
It is surprising how few servers need to be blocked to get rid of the obnoxious adds. (google is one of the few advertisers that i don't end up blocking, most times). This way i support sites which advertise to me in a non-obnoxious manner while some sites never seem to manage more than one add impression per 6 months to me.

just a nitpick about the nitpick,
from the point of view of any specific particle, relativity states more than 1 ly/year separation isn't achievable, so the total distance isn't 2 ly, a particle on one side of the universe would measure the distance to a particle at the other side of the universe as x% of 1 ly (depends on velocity) + inflated distance

2 particles going in opposite directions at 99% of the speed of light do not end up almost 2 ly apart, from the point of view of each other.

Against that there are people like me who have a linux desktop (duel boot, but these days it only runs linux), a windows laptop (linux in a vm), i use a windows desktop at uni, and 2 linux servers.

I have a total of 1 old stage 3 gentoo download, and 2 windows licences.
As most of the 'net is from my laptop and the windows desktop at uni i'm probably counted twice on the windows side, even though >50% of my time doing anything other than browsing the web is spent amongst the 3 different linux boxes i use.

Unfortunately, short of doing a random, large-scale survey and trusting the results, there isn't a good way to get statistical data like this.

because, as one of the up-thread comments says, a large file which looks true random is either encrypted or the output of a (good) random number generator. This software wouldn't be able to tell the difference. Unfortunately very few people need very large amounts of true random data, as the people who need the most random numbers are probably computational scientists, and then a good PRNG will do that for you.
Alternative needs of true random data relate to communication, or cryptography. Either way you are either 1) an academic (easy to rule out/use as an excuse) 2)have a need for better than internet banking security on your communication (once again easy to prove or rule out, as almost noone needs this) or 3) have a large encrypted file.

One way around this would be to format the blank space on your hard drive true-random, rather than a specific pattern. that way all space which hasn't been used recently looks like a blob of "encrypted/random" text. If you then go and shred (overwrite with random data) all files as you delete them, then having a block of random text on your hard drive is only then evidence of paranoia, not criminal conspiracy.

I've found the onboard graphics card on my laptop is good for a good portion of modern games - sins of a solar empire, gal. civ 2 (if i'm careful with the settings; beyond a certain number of objects on the screen the game suddenly gets very sluggish), Peggle. -- sure, none of them are 1st person shooters, but i've a desktop for when serious graphics need to be displayed, in the mean time, using a computer without any graphics card provides me sufficient entertainment while i'm on the train.
(oh, and I think the FF Australian dictionary needs an update, it marked peggle as a spelling error :p )

well, that's one explanation for the negative population growth in the western world (ignoring immigration)

I'm sorry, but while the 1st does guarantee the right to speak, it doesn't guarantee the right to an audience, and definitely doesn't infer the right to forcibly impose message i do not wish to hear on my time. (eg the sibling post which mentions spray paint on garage doors)

and XP sp3 also ....

year-mm-dd is by far the most usefull to me -- that way when you sort by the date in character format and numerical format they both end up in the right order.

try naming files backup 12-04-2009, backup 17-11-2008 in windows, then find the latest backup in amongst a group of 50 similar folders.
( yes you can sort by date created/modified, but sometimes that isn't accurate if the backups have been copied/moved. yes, i know some type of content management system would be better for this ... )