I can see the benefit in doing this for desktops: most cases are non-standard, which means throwing it out when upgrade time comes around. I've toyed with the idea of making a standard ATX case out of paper pulp.

But servers? Ideally, they would be mostly caseless: think blades, or using the rack as the case; just slap a face on the front (to maintain proper airflow), and you're done.

Now, if we could make circuit boards more recyclable, that would be terrific. Though FR4 is already fiberglass; I suppose it could be dissolved in hydrofluoric acid and the metals recovered, though I have no idea how environmentally (un)friendly that is.

IBM PCs of the era had a similar option: attach the RAM to the ISA bus via an add-on card. Like the Amiga (and most computers of that era), the expansion bus was the processor bus (with a bit of buffering and maybe a tad bit of glue logic, but not much more).

As processor speeds increased, this became a problem. Many peripherals just weren't designed for the increased speed, so they divorced the bus speed from the processor speed by making it a fraction of the processor speed (ISA) or going asynchronous (Amiga Zorro III). This became quite pronounced with PCI (max 66MHz, even if you're running a 3.0GHz CPU); you can add memory onto the bus, but it will slow you down if you try to use it as main memory.

That doesn't mean it can't be used at all these days. The cluster computer folks have a concept called NUMA, or non-uniform memory access, where memory isn't considered necessarily equal in speed. Or you could treat it like a very fast SATA drive, provided you have the necessary means of keeping power to it during power failure events (or use it only as temp or swap space).

From Ted Ts'o's commentary, it's an optimization ("jbd2: don't write superblock when if its empty") gone awry:

The reason why the problem happens rarely is that the effect of the buggy commit is that if the journal's starting block is zero, we fail to truncate the journal when we unmount the file system. This can happen if we mount and then unmount the file system fairly quickly, before the log has a chance to wrap.

Basically, this optimization has the side effect of not updating the transaction log in this rare case. You can end up replaying old transactions after new ones, which will scramble metadata blocks. Given the rather unique conditions needed to hit this one, I'm not going to lose any sleep over any servers running without Ted's fix (though I'll certainly apply it once RedHat releases the patch).

Aereo is doing this for their TV-to-internet service: each user gets his/her own antenna, in the hopes that it avoids legal issues. They create stacks of mini antenna arrays and set them up somewhere in Brooklyn. The wavelength for TV is 30 cm to 5 m, depending on the channel; both dimensions are much larger than the dime-sized antenna shown there.

How this exactly works, well, I can't exactly say. Although I am an electrical engineer, I have to admit that antenna design has always been out of my league.

I wouldn't quite say "simple" for a lot of folks, myself included. There are two reasons why I ended up going with a unibody MacBook Pro (2009-era) when my last laptop died: It has a decently sturdy build quality (much better than the Dell I gave up) and, when something goes wrong, I can take it to a human, point out exactly what's wrong, and say, "Fix it" rather than play phone and shipping tag with some contracted-out support company. At the time, upgradability didn't factor into my decision; it was just as upgradeable as every other system I considered. Since I purchased this machine, I've upped the RAM from 4 GB to 8 GB and swapped the rotational hard drive for an SSD. I've also had to use the Genius Bar to address a charging issue (1 hour of my time, vs. 2-3 months getting the run-around with Toshiba for my wife's previous laptop; there's a brand I'll never touch again).

(Mac OS? It's nice because it has the Unix command line utilities I'm accustomed to; Cygwin and Interix are clunky at best. UI isn't as nice as Windows 7, though.)

Now that Apple has removed the upgradability feature, I'm not quite sure where I'll go next.

Oh, I definitely build my own desktops. Laptops are a different beast, though; because the form factors are non-standard, it's difficult to find parts which play nicely. You can't just add a dedicated graphics card, for example, and the motherboard+screen+case are pretty much a unit (though your example of replacing the EEE's screen for a touch-enabled one is impressive).

If they're under 13 (elementary and middle school age range), they're not allowed to access Facebook due to their terms of service and (in the US, at least) COPPA.

From Facebook's terms of service:
You will not use Facebook if you are under 13.

This is due to the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, which requires verified parental consent before children can provide information to the website. While this does not impact you directly (that is, the FTC isn't going to knock on your door), you could get some heat from parents or administrators for allowing it at all.

Personally, I think the law is too draconian, but I wouldn't put my position in jeopardy to protest it.

The main issue I have with devices in the size-range of the Galaxy Nexus (I have a Droid Razr Maxx) is the ability to grip and use it one handed (hitting buttons with your thumb). It's not something I need to do terribly often, but I had gotten used to this coming from 6+ years of owning a BlackBerry. If it were closer to an iPhone in size, I'd be ecstatic. (I'm still quite happy with it: a nice, long battery life, Gorilla Glass, and I can toy with Android development on it.)

That said, I don't see this as such a huge deal that I would go on a rant about it.

Because I last week I thought that making an -rc7 was not necessarily realy required, except perhaps mainly to check the late printk changes. But then today and yesterday, I got a ton of small pull requests, and now I find myself releasing an -rc7 that is actually bigger than rc6 was.

My main beef with the clamshell design is it's difficult to use from your average economy seat on an airplane. If you have the keyboard at a comfortable typing distance, the screen has to tilt forward to not hit the seat in front of you. Getting it to a proper angle means pulling the keyboard uncomfortably close to your body.

The Vadem Clio had an interesting design where the screen was mounted in the middle on arms that attached to the back. Thus, it could hover over the keyboard and still tilt back. I never got a chance to see or use one, but I had hopes this design would alleviate the airplane seat problem. Alas, it seems to have disappeared from the market, and the patents for this design are either not being licensed out or nobody wants to take this risk.

Not sure if the wording was accidental, but non-profit != does not make a profit. The main limitation is that surplus revenues (what would normally be "profit") must be used to further the organization's goals, not benefit investors (via dividends) or employees (via profit-sharing). In fact, a well-run non-profit should be bringing in extra income and expanding its programs and services. The Wikipedia article on this is well-written.

Conversely, a business can be for-profit but still not have income (or even lose money). Within the U.S., the distinction is whether your organization is recognized by the IRS as a 501(c) entity; there are a number of tests it must pass (along with a few forms which need to be sent in).

This made me curious, so I did a bit of digging (a few minutes on Google) and turned up this article about the keyhole satellites, which supposedly (no citations given) have a resolution of 5-6 inches from a 200 mile orbit. Assuming they could be brought down to 80 miles and everything scales (which is a crazy assumption, but this is all speculation and guesswork, anyway), that would be a resolution of 2-2.5 inches.

Enough to identify the writing on a cigarette? No. But one could probably rule out certain brands based on color, size, shape, etc., at that point. Without better data (which, I'm guessing, we're unlikely to come by for obvious reasons), I'd call this plausible.

I don't think that's the target. Look what Apple has done with Thunderbolt: it's their primary docking adapter for their laptops and they've made their new monitors the equivalent of docking stations. Basically, it has just enough bandwidth to carry a DisplayPort signal plus USB.

I have a 2009 MacBook Pro which commutes with me to and from the office. It's a tad annoying to have to plug in six different cables every time I get to my desk and unplug them when I leave (which is a few times a day due to meetings). I've wished for a decent docking station; Apple seems to be averse to including a connector for this purpose, and the third-party solutions I've tried are as kludgy as one might expect. The addition of Thunderbolt doesn't have me rushing out to replace my laptop (obviously), but I'll be happy to have it when the time comes to retire this machine.

(As for why I have a MacBook vs. a Windows laptop... well, it's rather well built (and has survived a few drops to date), is Unix-y enough to allow me to develop on it and still deploy the results to our Linux servers, and has built-in grep and zsh.)

I'm a bit skeptical about the seriousness that the hardware vendors treat security. Depending on how rushed to market the product is, a lot of corners are cut in both hardware and software development -- and Realtek seems to be no exception in my experience. We see malware on fresh-from-the-factory hard drives and USB drives, tagging a ride on drivers, etc., all the time.

And the Stuxnet architects said it best: "It turns out there is always an idiot around who doesn't think much about the thumb drive in their hand."