I'll bite: as long as the anyone in computer science writes software which is licensed with a disclaimer of warranty attached (even GPLv3 has "THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE PROGRAM “AS IS” WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND") then they're failed engineers. Real engineers have insurance for liability and warrant that their work is suitable for its intended use. Sure, there are support contracts available but when the majority of the computing workforce produce software that's 'good enough' and it's sold, installed and used without someone meeting their duty to care for the impact of their work, then they deserve the label 'failed engineer'.

I put an SSD in as system disk on my desktop,and it made me feel like a 12-year old boy again (guessing parent poster was once girl). When I was 12 we had a 25MHz ARM-powered desktop (Acorn A5000) which had its system software in ROM and which remains my definition of snappy. Windows 7 with 4GB of RAM and 4 2.5GHz AMD Phenom cores is nearly as snappy; Kubuntu 10.10 on the same hardware was dead on.

But to reply to TFA: no, I want spinning storage for the terabytes of archives my life will create, and the availabiliy of another speed/capacity tier of data cache will mean I'm always going to be sold the option of having both.

I wish someone had suggested I and the team I'm in work in a flexible and agile way a long time ago. I'm a recent convert, so excuse my fanaticism.

The manifesto recommends:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

in light of the following principles:

• Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
• Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage.
• Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
• Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
• Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
• The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
• Working software is the primary measure of progress.
• Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
• Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
• Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done--is essential.
• The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
• At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

It's the programming environment that works for dotNET developers (developers! developers!): Visual Studio plus ReSharper and the best of the platform flows from your fingers. Sadly, it's not the same as Vim or EMACS, where the best of the platform flows from your muscle memory...

QA in open source projects is volunteer work. You have the wireless cards and know that they don't work; Ubuntu's given you the tools to alter your configs and rebuild the kernel drivers into a working setup. What are the bug numbers where your patches are attached?

Canonical *don't* use their resources to employ QA team-members, nor to buy one of every piece of common hardware. Get your hands dirty and stop trolling.

My eyes hurt too if the brightness in the screen is above 15%, and most of the time the brightness is at 80+%. My HTC Hero adjusts the brightness automatically, and does a good job of being legible in sunlight and darkness.

The edit button's in the Revolution4 edition of Slashcode, coming when CowboyNeil stops writing fanfic.

Stallman's peace prize is already done -- but release manager rms refuses to make a formal release until his personal changes to the award are complete.

The important thing about play is the engagement of your imagination. That's why I look back at terrible 8-bit graphics and sound and remember them being so much more than what's on screen. Visuals and sounds that are too good -- or however immersive the motion control interface -- can't make up for not engaging my imagination.

unless all of your IP is kept as a trade secret such that third party disclosure completely fucks you

I think that would be my primary concern with having an outside party maintain my data storage services: trade secret is the term for IP you haven't yet valued and protected with copyrights, patents, design patents and trade marks. But breach of contract is a powerful thing, and having contracts which mandate notification and quantification of data breach within a specified timescale and which have an increasing penalty for late reporting, these contracts would be a core part of my risk management in this situation.

The thing that swings me in AMD's direction each time I put together a computer is that the MB and AMD CPU together are comparable for performance at a lower price point than the Intel chip and its MB.

There's a huge difference is culture with Linux distributions in contrast to Windows. Linux software is largely available under the GPL or other free licence. Debian package and sign 18,000+ packages and offer a central download service. That allows you to get software you want from a trustworthy central location without risk of it compromising your system. However, there are guides to hardening Debian out there on the internet (Google suggests http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/securing-debian-howto/), and there are willing helpers available on IRC.

At a minimum, I would split your / (root), /boot and /home mounts to different partitions and only allow nodev (no device) and noexec (no executables) in your /home partition. Then don't be afraid to blast away the root and boot partitions as often as you want. Create a script run daily using Cron to list your installed packages (something as simple as 'dpkg -l > /home/user/package-list.txt') so that a reinstall puts the base system onto your machine, you connect for signed, Debian-created updates and then you can reinstall everything else you had (using something like 'aptitude install /home/user/package-list.txt').