sudo rm -rf / won't delete anything.

POSIX rules state that you cannot remove any parent of the current directory. The GNU rm command doesn't fully check this, but it does make sure that you don't remove / or .. (but if you give the path to any other parent directory, it will let you remove that). Try it for yourself and see (in a VM of course).

Talk about timing. I'm right now recovering data from my first SSD failure (an almost three year old OCZ Vertex 2). As failures go, this couldn't have gone better. I'm able to read the drive, but I can't write to it. I wish all drive failures were this nice. I'm having Newegg overnight me a Samsung 480GB SSD as a replacement. I should probably think about replacing the two SSDs that are older than the one that failed, just in case.

Just this year I've lost two 1TB hard drives, and one of them somehow corrupted my (thankfully backed up) RAID 5 making it unrecoverable. So, I decided to replace the older consumer grade 1TB drives with 3TB WD Red drives (supposedly enterprise grade), and what do you know? One of them is dead on arrival. WD replaced it with a "recertified" drive, which is annoying, but at least it works.

I also lost a Blu-ray drive, so it hasn't been a good year for my storage devices, but so far my anecdotal experience has SSDs with better reliability than mechanical drives. YMMV.

This deserves some Funny mods, but I seem to be out of them at the moment.

There is, however, a Chinese brand called Ainol, which is almost as funny.

Insert joke about whether it's better to give their products then recive them.

Sometimes a task is too hard and repetitive in a traditional editor, but too trivial to require a script. For such tasks, an editor with good macro support is a must, and nothing comes close to Emacs or vim for macro support.

I still prefer writing code in Emacs, though some tasks are much better done in an IDE. I tend to use both, and I have Emacs and the IDE detect when a file has changed and revert to the filesystem version. This way I can switch between them depending on what I'm trying to do.

Emacs will usually use either the Super key (usually called the Windows key) or the Alt key with the Esc key as a fallback (Esc doesn't use cording). I prefer the Super key but in the last few years distributions have been reserving that key for the window manager, so they intercept the key before it gets to Emacs. The real problem with Alt is with the terminal, where Alt+F opens the file menu instead of moving forward one word, which forces me to turn off the menu bar to use Emacs mode in bash. It isn't a big deal, and it is a lot easier to adjust to than wrestling with the WM and xmodmap.

Alt isn't the ideal key to be chording, but after a little practice it becomes second nature. I have to say, I have seen people buy vi friendly keyboards with the Esc key above the tab, but I've never seen anyone actually use Ctrl-[ when they didn't have to.

The original claim is that performance is worse by orders of magnitude in a memory constrained environments. It doesn't sound like the mobile optimized GC is orders of magnitude worse than a desktop optimized GC, so in a memory constrained environment the mobile GC would perform better than the desktop GC.

Of course, the author doesn't provide any numbers, so all we have to go by are his expertise and that his arguments are reasonable. Further research will be necessary.

Unlikely. VGA was introduced in 1987, and it only offered 640x480. Perhaps you meant to type 1995?

To indicate that a record is somehow tainted, right?

To quote professor Frink, "Baseball is a game played by the dextrous, but only understood by the pointdexterous."

Unfortunately, I couldn't find a Youtube clip to link to. The episode is "MoneyBart" (Season 22, Episode 3).

It depends on the Zenbook. The earlier ones had bad keyboards and even worse trackpads. Apparently, ASUS was embarrassed enough by the reviews that they made a real effort on later models. I have a UX31A and it is just awesome. The backlit keyboard and trackpad are roughly equal in quality to a Macbook Air (which means they're better than everything else I've used) and the display is a wonderful 1080p IPS display with a matte finish that is the nicest 13" display I've ever seen. Throw in an i7 processor, 256GB SSD, and the Ultrabook form factor, and I just love this thing.

My only complaint is that it was limited to 4GB of RAM when I bought it. And the memory is not upgradable (not surprising for an Ultrabook) so I'm stuck at 4GB until I buy another notebook. That cuts its usable life somewhat, but I still have no regrets on the purchase.

I'm using the stock Windows 7 on it right now, but I'm hoping to get Linux Mint on it eventually. The only application keeping me on Windows in Netflix (yes, I know it can be made to run on Linux). And it seems that while Linux support is good, ASUS does something funky with power management and Linux or vanilla Windows 7 (without the ASUS drivers) gets about half (!) the usable battery time of the ASUS optimised Windows 7 install.

Destructive malware stopped being common simply because it is more profitable to keep the machine compromised. (And perhaps because with the death of DOS and Win9x, destruction became harder to do.) Unless you are a government or other political entity, most hacking is done for money or for lulz. For governments and terrorist organizations, destruction is still a valid goal.

Solar thermal isn't without its problems, mainly that it needs cooling. A proposal for a solar thermal plant here in Arizona was opposed because of its high water usage, and water is by far our biggest environmental concern (it's currently on hold for financial reasons). Dry cooling is possible, but it's much less efficient and therefore more expensive.

Other desert states like California and Nevada are also having problems with solar thermal. Some form of solar energy should be our future, but getting there hasn't been as easy as advertised.

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/water-use-by-solar-projects-intensifies/

I remember using tabs in Galeon on Linux before Opera had them. Opera has always had MDI, and it was the first mainstream browser to use tabs for MDI, but it wasn't the first browser with tabs. I don't think anyone really knows who did it first.

My HTC One S was seeing the scroll interpreted as click problem, but I didn't see any lag. Perhaps that is dependent on the hardware?

Overall, the main page sucks, but its okay for viewing articles. I'll stick with the desktop version and maybe try the mobile again in a few months.

And I agree with the complaints about the theme. Slashdot has a certain look to it that the mobile version lacks.