I'm an 80's metal head. I even played bass in a metal band up until 2009.

The Black album was an abortion, but I could forgive them for it.

3 main things drove me away from them.

First, they essentially released Cliff 'em All and then relegated Cliff to nothing more than a footnote. I went to see them on their black album tour and they played a half hour video before the show of which, I kid you not, 30-45 seconds at the beginning mentioned Cliff. The remaining 29 minutes made a point of excluding him. Even in clips of old shows and behind the scenes footage from those years they purposefully omitted anything that had him in it. To top that off they billed it as a 4 hour show and played maybe 1.5 hours and called it a night.

Second, Load of shit, and Reload of shit.

Third, and what was the final nail in the coffin was the Napster incident. For a band, who were where they were only because of bootlegging, to unleash the lawyers on their fans was the biggest kick in the balls, douche bag move I've ever witnessed from anyone in the genre. I wouldn't have heard or bought their albums, or gone to their shows had it not been for my cousin giving me a dubbed cassette tape of Ride The Lightning.

I vowed then that they would never see another dime from me, and they haven't and never will. I wouldn't piss on them if they were on fire.

I still listen to the Cliff era music, but that's the only music they ever put out really worth listening to anyway.

I'm all about Maiden though!

Several years ago I bought a Samsung laser printer, new, for about $80.. It's currently connected to a Raspberry Pi which is acting as it's print server. It took about a year to burn through the demo toner cartridge that came with it. I bought a full replacement cartridge for $30 and have been printing from that ever since.

I have sworn off inkjets.. Never again..

I can go for months without printing on my laser printer and when I come back to use it everything is fine.. Every inkjet I've ever owned or touched would dry up in a month of idling, prompting another round of shelling out $80 or more for ink cartridges that run dry after only a few dozen pages at best. Again prompting another round of $80 or more, rinse, repeat.

I've printed THOUSANDS of pages on my current, couple year old $30 toner cartridge and it's showing no signs of stopping anytime soon. The quality is better, the life span is better, the economics are astoundingly more rational than inkjet.

I'm quite sure they could find some low level mess that needs attention.. There is plenty out there.. Honestly, even if kernel code is what they dream of at night then spending their time testing, validating, and patching problems in either or both of the Linux and FreeBSD kernels would be far more beneficial to the entire FOSS ecosystem than another GNU distro port using the FreeBSD kernel.

Again, they can spend their time however they want. I just think it's a shame it wasn't spent doing something more beneficial/practical.

You're right, it's not my time and I'm not going to claim to desire to dictate how they spend theirs.

I just don't see the value proposition in spending time on this versus spending the time perfecting Arch Linux. I'm not an Arch user, though I'm interested in it. Right now I tend to mainly use Debian, Mint, and FreeBSD. What I'm sure of is that there are bugs and usability issues in Arch that this effort could have been used to address.

I can appreciate their efforts from a technical standpoint, but in the end they used that time to create a technical novelty that in reality will not see a long term use nor large scale adoption. A sharper and more polished Arch experience would have a tremendously larger impact compared to this.

I'll agree there. It's a nice resume bullet point.

Technological masturbation what these GNU "Linux" userlands with FreeBSD kernel projects boil down to. FreeBSD already comes with a tightly integrated and very secure userland. Use the best tool for the job.. The Linux kernel is great.. The FreeBSD kernel is great.. If you need GNU/Linux userland functionality either use GNU/Linux or simply use a native FreeBSD version of those tools on a native FreeBSD system. If you need FreeBSD functionality use a userland designed and optimized specifically for it instead of trying to hammer a foreign kludge on top of it..

Wasted effort that would have been better spent on something useful.

Bruce, Microsoft contributed the SILK codec used in Skype to the Opus project and released any related patents royalty free. I would have a hard time trusting MS if they told me the sky was blue, but they basically made the low bitrate capability of Opus legally doable.

As for those who are posting their scepticism about the opus codec's quality, the IETF standardised Opus as RFC 6716 and is making it a mandatory to implement codec for WebRTC based on it's proven performance at every applicable bitrate.

For quality comparison info:
http://opus-codec.org/comparison/

RFC 6716:
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716

I got mine in the middle of last month from Element14. It arrived 3 days after I ordered it and they said it would take weeks.

I ran it for a couple of weeks with raspbian as a print server and last night I replaced my old TV connected media PC that ran XBMC with the Pi running OpenELEC. The media files are stored on a FreeBSD server in my basement and the Pi accesses them through an NFS mount. Works great for everything so far, though the interface is a bit more laggy than the old media PC. It's still very usable and for the power savings over that old P4 machine it replaced I'll deal with the minor lag.

I have several SDHC cards with different config images on them (print server, XBMC, etc).. It's nice to have a little low power device which can change into a completely new machine by simply swapping a little SD card.

That's all well and good if all you use your computer for is media consumption, but I use my computer to do work. My workstation has a 1920x1200 monitor. My TV is 1920x1080. I don't want to use a TV for my monitor.

I have an Asus ProArt PA246Q which is the predecessor of the linked monitor, and I've been nothing but thrilled with it.

Mine is very much designed for color accuracy and graphics work; the bezel even has ruler marks along the edges of the screen.

No issues playing games or video, and the color capability is outstanding.

I purposefully bought this monitor for the color accuracy and the aspect ratio,,

1920x1200.. It was a perfect replacement for my 21" 4:3 montior as the screen is the same height, just wider than the 21".

I bought mine for $480 new, which was quite a premium over similar 16:9 monitors.. But, 16:10 (8:5) aspect ratio matters to me because I want to do work on my computer, not just watch movies, and I voted with my wallet.

That's too complicated.. I typically use a short phrase of common words (usually 18-25 characters long) with misplaced numbers, capitalization, and punctuation. I've run them through password checkers that take dictionary attacks into consideration and even at 1 trillion guesses per second they average out to requiring about 4 quintillion years to break.. Since that is FAR longer than the age of the universe, I'm not too worried about it. It's also much easier to remember and type in a short phrase than to deal with a 128 character monster of a password.

Is that the IETF WebRTC draft mandates the Opus audio codec for all clients..
http://www.opus-codec.org/

From:
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-rtcweb-audio-01
3. Codec Requirements

      To ensure a baseline level of interoperability between WebRTC
      clients, a minimum set of required codecs are specified below. While
      this section specifies the codecs that will be mandated for all
      WebRTC client implementations, it leaves the question of supporting
      additional codecs to the will of the implementer.

      WebRTC clients are REQUIRED to implement the following audio codecs.

      o Opus [RFC6716], with any ptime value up to 120 ms

I'd do the last 100 years and go see all my favorite bands play shows at their peaks..

Outside of that I'd pretty much stick to the future.

"X-plane is a cross-platform flight simulator app, notably the only serious one that supports Mac OSX and Linux."

And here I've been using http://flightgear.org/ all this time. I thought I was using a serious, free, GPL open-source flight simulator that runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.. I'm glad this slashdot post came up to tell me I was wrong.

Dude charges for X-plane.. When you decide to charge for software you accept all the financial responsibility for defending it against litigation. Welcome to it.