If you can find something like the Dell Vostro v13 with linux preloaded (I did this a while back and got a nice ultralight for around 550 USD), you can avoid paying for Windows when you don't really need it.

I run both this v13 with Ubuntu, and a MacBook Pro. The v13 + Ubuntu LTS 64 bit is great but not as polished as the Mac experience. If you don't mind occasional use of a terminal window and more bugs in general I recommend it. It is very usable for me.

I'm also a member. I have written scathing reviews for products. My goal is to have helpful, highly-rated reviews. This is what makes you eligible for Vine. Writing 5 star reviews of crap products does not satisfy this goal. I think Vine is actually a very well done program.

My Vine reviews *which are clearly marked as such on Amazon*, actually receive lower ratings, as there are groups of people what always vote Vine reviews as not helpful.

It is actually a lot of work write good reviews for stuff. I often have to decline getting free stuff because I don't have time to do a really quality review.

There is a lot of value in a helpful review. That is why buying on Amazon is so great. How many times have you been in a store, ready to buy something, and then check Amazon reviews to make sure it isn't crap first.

This is a common pattern, not just in the US. Keep in mind people watch a lot of TV, and the message is, to a large degree, controlled by the very rich and/or large corporations.

Money -> TV / Media -> Influence -> Less Educated / Lower Income Folks -> Support at the Polls

Two bad side effects may be:

- Less merging (which will slow progress)
- More critical bugs triaged as non-critical to avoid blocking releases.

I like the Chrome team's ideas to have multiple branches, only do merges in one direction (towards more stable branches), and making features easily removable so they can be nuked if they are not stable enough to make a release. I'm not sure of a clean way to do the easy code disabling with PHP.

http://goo.gl/G2uDn

  In general, though, more merging is better than less merging. It will be interesting to see how this pans out for Drupal.

The article is rubbish (best app-to-app latencies right now are tens of microseconds). These comments are mostly rubbish too.

It is good to call attention to features that need work.

It is better to contribute code towards the solution.

This talk about agism makes the assumption that there is some prejudice against older workers. What is this assumption based on?

I find it much more likely that people just get tired of coding and move on to other pursuits.

In other news: Microsoft says they really like Netscape Navigator and want their Java implementation to be compatible with others. Oh and they think Microsoft Word files should be backwards compatible as well.