This is hardly some major breakthrough.

Asus came up with a nice hack on their EeePC dubbed "Boot Booster". It dumps the system state right after POST on a HDD partition, and on subsequent boots it reads that straight into memory, so you have 1-second "POSTs" going straight to the bootloader.

And then you have coreboot, which is as fast as the machine it runs on: without taking any shortcuts, it can do all the grunt work in 3 seconds or so.

Maybe the breakthrough is Windows booting fast, but that's a different story.

Do Kensington locks on macbooks feature a magsafe connector?

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or trolling, but I'll bite:

I've been sitting my ass on mobiles for 10 years. That's all my phones except my first brick of a Sony, that couldn't fit in my backpocket.

Out of all the perverted treatment I subjected my phones to, the only one that got hurt was an Ericsson T28: its screen got cracked when I slipped on ice and landed on my ass. That's my full weight landing on a thin glass+electronics+thin metal/plastic shell, and the phone was still working but the LCD was barely readable.

Compare that to 2 out of 6 iPhone owners I know -- they got their screens cracked: one vibrated itself off a table, and the other one got dropped on concrete. I know I've dropped my phones many-a-times from varying heights, and none got hurt. Probably because other manufacturers build their devices for real-world use, and test them as such: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zES6byXbOaE -- jump to about 6:00 and witness the bending test, aka ass-sitting-on-cellphone-test.

Does Apple test the iThingies like that? Do they bake them to unbearable temperatures? Probably not, because this looks like a design flaw easily uncovered with a bit of prodding/bending/overheating.

You're right, it won't under linux.

Actually the GP is rather wrong in saying it will run linux. If you want to use your GMA500, you're stuck with a specific kernel version, a specific mesa, and a specific x.org, with no upgrade path for now.

The Z series Atoms are nice, the chipsets paired with it are very low power, the PowerVR graphics kicks ass, and that tiny box is really sweet. But if you want linux, you have to stay away from Poulsbo.

At some point I started getting russian spam. Useless since I can't read it, but still annoying since Gmail didn't recognize it as spam. So I came up with this filter:
Matches: from:(.ru)
Do this: Skip Inbox, Delete it

It works for most of it, and the few that didn't come from .ru addresses I'd flag manually as spam. But I haven't seen one pass through in quite a while, so I guess Gmail got better at russian.

And some unrelated anecdotal food for thought: I started getting german spam one week after ordering from amazon.de.

I run Debian testing. It's very much a rolling release, and you're somewhat protected against obvious bugs by the nice policy. Of course, you can get more rolling than that and go full unstable. And throw in some experimental if you're feeling brave.

The nice thing is you can mix-and-match. Most of my packages are testing, some are unstable, and right now i have a touch of experimental. With some APT pinning, you get a rolling release where you can decide per-package how bleeding edge you want to be.

This is my laptop/desktop. For servers I mostly stick to stable, and if i really need a newer package I can pin it from testing, or look for it on backports.org.

Whoever modded the parent as troll is a moron. Offtopic maybe, but not troll. Go ahead and mod me down too.

The parent is right. I've had my paranoid period and tried NoScript; the web was so damn broken, and clicking to allow JS over and over again turned so tiresome that I turned to everything whitelisted by default, and finally uninstalled NoScript after the AdBlock fiasco.

About how bad of a language JavaScript is or isn't: I personally like it, though I'd prefer Lua, or say, Python; but JS is here to stay and it serves its purpose. Except that purpose isn't replacing HTML, or turning HTTP into something it was never meant to be. Back when I was coding JS, we were doing it to improve the user experience, not replace it altogether. Nowadays "web developers" use [insert random JS framework] for everything, but the problem is so, so many use it in braindead ways. You middle click on a thumbnail expecting to open the image in a new tab, but you just get the same page with a nice # added at the end. And then there's the idiots doing <a href="javascript:">, and the utter idiots with an attitude that do onclick="submit_something_via_post" and figure out they know better how the web is supposed to work... These are usually the same idiots that will do broken browser detection based on the User-Agent string, and usually fail miserably if your browser sends along "Gecko", but not "Firefox". Say, something like "Iceweasel". For a nice example of how far this stupidity goes, try browsing VIA's site.

You want to use XHR when clicking on a link? Or submitting a form? That's all fine and dandy, but don't break the web. It's becoming more and more like flash, with the sole difference you can view-source.

If you're building Google Docs or Meebo, all hail JavaScript. But for mostly everything else, lack of graceful degradation with JS disabled is pure idiocy. Not just because there's paranoid people browsing with JS disabled, but because there's blind people using the web, and people with antiquated handhelds, or simply stuck in a console trying to fix nvidia's latest fuck-up. Of course, it would take building the site / web app properly from the bottom up: HTML, server interaction, CSS, JavaScript. But the "developers" these day start with YUI or Dojo: some shiny animation is the end purpose in on itself, not an improvement to conveying information.

By the way: did you try GMail with JS disabled? It works. It probably works in lynx too, since it works in elinks just fine. That's the way JS is supposed to be used.

</rant>