I suppose filling in a loan application form in red crayon is a bad idea? that might explain why I had so many problems...

Obligatory comic

I agree. I think your project is doomed without a lot of luck or divine intervention.

I feel I can speak on behalf of the slashdot community that our thoughts are with you at this difficult time

The inquirer has the link to the original post

I have been using OpenSuse since around v10, mostly with KDE but I have gnome installed as well. I find Yast (essentially a nicer Linux version of Microsoft's control panel) easy to use, so adding printers, scanners etc. is easy to do. GUI or text versions are very similar.

It would be good if you could do a follow up post of how you get on with whatever distro you choose.

I can recommend Rocks as well, although you WILL need the slave nodes to have disks in them (you could scrounge some ancient 40Gb drives from somewhere...) you seem to want hardware information so...

First point is to have all the fans pointing the same way. Large HPC's arrange cabinets back-to-back, so you have a 'hot' corridor and a 'cold' corridor, which enables you to access both sides of the cabinet and saves some money on cooling.
My old workplace had two clusters and various servers in an air conditioned room, with all the nodes pointing the back wall. probably similar to what you have.
Don't know anything about the UPS, but I would assume having it on the floor would be OK.

Good luck with your project. Write a post in the future telling us how it goes.

Prenda have much bigger things to worry about than the EFF. They have really annoyed a federal judge, and may be guilty of perjury, contempt of court, fraud on the court and identity theft. Probably a couple of other offences as well.

Prenda isn't finished yet, but given the recent hearing they probably won't be around much longer

I am going to go with hoverboards!

Pick any monitor you wish, then put it on a pile of books. you can get it as high as you wish

The original wii filled the casual gamers market with a simple remote that even my 84 year old grandfather could use (this is the guy who's mobile phone went off so he put it under the tap to get it to shut up). Nintendo came up with simple, fun games and few additional accessories to go with it.

For this market, graphics/HD are not really needed and are not especially important. Why bother to upgrade?
"Hard Core" gamers would go and buy the Xbox720/PS4 when they come out as graphics/gameplay/improved physics are important. Not so much for more casual gamers.

I have a Wii, and have no intention of buying the WiiU.

Or how about an autotargeting kilowatt laser?

They are aiming the GTX Titan at the GPU scientific computing market- by fitting up to three of the things in a smaller form factor and running on a (relatively) small power footprint of 250W, these can be useful for CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) calculations, quantum chemistry calculations, protein folding, bitcoin mining (as mentioned by msauve) the list goes on.

I don't think this is quite what your after, and it is expensive as hell, but have you tried Matlab?

I'm not as pessimistic. I don't think that many people are going to buy one- so not much wasted. Problem solved