Actually, no, this has nothing to do with linux-libre which simply breaks every driver with firmware or a table of numbers they don't understand.

Apple has way too much experience being burned by Motorola and IBM both being unable to supply chips in heavy demand.

As I recall, Motorola and IBM had no problem with regular supply. The problem was that Apple was the only major customer for desktop/laptop-suitable PowerPC processors, and those vendors quite reasonably expected long-term order commitments for these products while Apple wanted more flexibility. With Intel, Apple is just one of many customers and while it has less control over x86 processor development it also doesn't have to make such commitments.

There is a hoax running especially in Europe, +358 or similar number, similar to Italy code (+35). Once you get a "ring" from that line or tricked calling it, your phone bill will be doomed. I speak about thousands of dollars (euros) here and you can't get that money back.

Urban legend.

I believe that the hybrid connector is still in the spec as an option, but no-one appears to be implementing it. The standard host connector for USB 3 has extra electrical contacts deeper in the plug.

The flash change is in some ways a downgrade, because wear-leveling is now done by firmware in the flash controller rather than in the filesystem (which was JFFS2). Although JFFS2 probably doesn't scale to 4GB, ubifs might.

I briefly played with one last week. It booted into GNOME, which had a desktop icon to start Sugar. There may well be a facility to do this the other way round.

No references; it's just what I've heard (backed up by examples) from friends who develop ARM-based embedded systems.

As for Nvidia, do they have any chips that fit in the price and power brackets of netbooks?

Hmm, apparently they do, in the form of their own ARM SoC...

You are confusing criminal and civil cases..

MS still supports Windows Server on Itanium, and the X-Box 360 runs a somewhat modified NT kernel on PowerPC (even big-endian!). So I think the HAL is still useful to MS.

I'd love a low-power, high-performance ARM notebook. I'd be happy with MIPS or Loongson (Chinese MIPS clone) as well. Debian already has a full-blown ARM port and I'll bet they could get it working on an ARM netbook in a day. Ubuntu would undoubtedly be soon-to-follow.

There was an ARM employee at DebConf with a protoype ARM-based netbook. I forget whether it was running Debian or Ubuntu, but in any case the software is basically ready.

As a side benefit, having multiple widely-used architectures for desktop systems (x86 and ARM) would be a support nightmare for hardware companies that still keep their drivers proprietary and undocumented. Yeah, I'm looking at you, Broadcom and NVidia.

I'm pretty sure Broadcom is already providing drivers for ARM as many home routers run on ARM. As for Nvidia, do they have any chips that fit in the price and power brackets of netbooks?

I see a significant barrier to ARM adoption in GCC's code generator, which is poor and apparently getting worse as the optimisations are more tuned for x86 than RISC processors. ARM, like Intel, has its own commercial compiler but it would probably make business sense for them to contribute to GCC as well, just as Intel does.

Chips aren't functionally "moving parts" but surface-mounted chips with high power dissipation experience thermal cycling and stress. That seems like wear and tear to me.

There are some quick pans, and it's certainly enough to show up the characteristic flaws of each codec. I attempted a blind test by randomising the order of the files, but I could see which was which anyway.

10 seconds is absurdly short for any kind of codec test.

WTFV. The keyframe interval is 10 seconds but the clip is nearly 5 minutes long.

Different ISPs implement filtering in different ways. Many will reroute the IP addresses of the servers with blocked pages/images through a web proxy, which became obvious during the blacklisting of pages on Wikipedia and the Internet Archive. Still, a UK user who is determined to get around Cleanfeed can use a proxy outside the UK or in a data centre (my understanding is that outbound connections from data centres have not been considered). Or, of course, change ISP.