I checked out the wiki page, and looks like out of the 11 models, 6 support IPv6 (and a few other features such as VLANs, 5GHz) while the other 5 don't. How exactly does one know if one is getting Tomato which ones do? Also, the bandwidth management & superior QoS - is that there for both IPv4 AND IPv6? Also, except Shibby, none of them have IPSEC support.

Incidentally, which CPU is Tomato geared towards? MIPS? Given that it's there for Broadcom routers?

Forgot to add - the US does have Alaska, so Obama can't claim no proximity to the Arctic circle. Particularly since he believes that the US has 57 states, so AK has to be one of them.

So we can then have Stephen Harper establish his credentials as the leader of the Free World, by taking on Putin. It may seem a lot, except that Russia is as sparsely populated as Canada.

One idea - move all unemployed Americans - or USians, as /.ers like to call it - to Ellesmere & Baffin Island, so that the Western claims on the North Pole is established. There would be enough to take on the entire Russian army - and I'd bet that most of them are there on their borders w/ Ukraine, as well as the Caucasus, and not on their northern shore.

In the meantime, the world's 'Have-nots' can make a beeline for the Antarctic...

Maybe, but I was talking about having the OS on a drive separate from the main applications & data. Say the BIOS and OS kernel in a BIOS NOR flash, the rest of the OS on, say, a PCIe SSD and all the applications & data on a separate SATA drive - HDD or SSD.

Other reason for having the OS on SSD is that one doesn't frequently change the OS data - it's mainly read, except for times one does an OS update. Given that the endurance of SSDs are lower than that of HDDs, it makes sense that something that's less frequently updated would sit on an SSD, while user data, which is frequently updated, would sit on an HDD. Also, the OS is a fixed size, and would typically be something like 16GB. So one could get an SLC SSD - one w/ the highest performance, w/ a PCIe interface, w/ a low enough density to avoid blowing up the cost of the configuration, and just use it for the OS.

Also - how big is the OS itself - in terms of Mb/Gb? Windows 8.1 is overall some 16GB, from what I understand, so how big would the kernel be? Reason I ask is that so far, PCs have had a NOR flash of 4Mb for their BIOS. Given how memory densities have grown, there is the scope here to grow the BIOS flash and contain within it the entire kernel of Linux/*BSD/Windows8.*, and then let the rest of the OS reside on the storage.

That way, the system is more secure, since there are ways a BIOS flash can be protected by hardware (Write Protection states, for one) and other things that fall in Userland can go into an SSD or an HDD, depending on the system configuration. User data, such as movies, can go into the HDDs.

Having followed this for some time now, one thing I don't get - why do people go for SATA SDDs instead of all the way for PCIe ones? Cost can't be the reason, b'cos the only reason to prefer flash memory to the usual hard disk media is performance. It wouldn't make sense to put a PCIe interface on an HDD, since there is no way the HDD could provide the data at that speed. But flash is different, and can. So it only makes sense to go w/ SATA/PATA HDDs if cost is the issue, and PCIe SDDs if performance is. But I just don't see the point in going w/ SATA SDDs, where one gets all the disadvantages of both SATA and SDDs, and the only advantages of SATA - cost - is probably more than offset by the disadvantage of SDD - which is again cost.

So someone explain to me again - what's the case for going w/ SATA SDDs at all?

Why so? It makes sense to concentrate Ubuntu on a platform where Windows doesn't exist (unless MS directly works on it). Any x64 based platform will have Windows running, but only a few custom ARM builds will. So what Ubuntu has done here makes good sense. They can stage it on the Raspberry Pi or Beagleboards & be off to the races.

Actually, KDE has been spun off. And does Ubuntu offer its distro w/ GNOME 3?

Does Mint now follow Ubuntu releases at all? Or just stick to Debian? B'cos under the hood, it's Debian, and since Unity has been the hood ornament of Ubuntu for some time now (not counting Xubuntu/Lubuntu), which Mint doesn't use, why would Mint bother following Ubuntu at all? It may have started off as an Ubuntu derivative, but is it so any longer?

Exchange is not a part of Office. Outlook is, but it's not as integral a part of it as is PowerPoint & Access. One could replace Outlook w/ Seamonkey and do just fine. Besides, an increasing number of mails are webmail enabled, if not directly off Gmail, and could just use whatever browser one is using (granted, w/ curtailed functionality)

Not just Excel, PowerPoint as well. Get the LO and CalligraSuite spreadsheets and presentation packages on par w/ Excel & PowerPoint, and you'll see a lot more adapters of those. Office doesn't consist of just Word.

Not just that, the only people who'd find such bugs are the people actually working on those programs. Usually, not their downstream users.

The 'millions of eyeballs' meme is just that. How many people actually know how to read code? Just b'cos it's open doesn't mean that it's comprehendible, and therefore, the fact that the code is open & out there doesn't have that much of an advantage, particularly when it's such complex code.

How?

Isn't OS-X written in ObjectiveC - at least the parts that are not FreeBSD or XNU?