One data point: The asus 1215T can be bought without an OS (through newegg.com) - but it's ATI graphics. Yuck.

I just purchased the 1215N even though I don't want windows. . . the nvidia ION chipset + dual core atom has seduced me. I plan to get debian sid running on it. I have been happy - nay, ECSTATIC - with my eeepc 1000, so a larger screen and dual cores should be pretty sweet.

She got in a fight with a retired attorney here, where he calls out her sockpuppetting and claims that "fair use doesn't apply," like just saying it would make it so.

Anyway - she's clearing using an autoblogging plugin like wp-robot (won't link, they are scum) to rip articles from other sites via RSS while stripping attribution in her attempt to extort money from people more ill-informed than her - if they exist. Basically, she is guilty of exactly what she's accusing others of doing.

I love cranks. They really keep the world interesting.

Full disclosure: I sysadmin blogs.law.harvard.edu.

I'm betting they're building this in a framework (though "framework" may be too grand a word) that mixes the presentation and logic layer. All that whitespace represents branches in the code (conditionals, database queries, etc.) that weren't executed for that particular page view - or were executed and nothing was output to the screen in that line number. If you don't write your erb tags correctly in Rails, it'll emit spurious whitespace into the source, too. If you weren't writing your logic in your controllers or models (bad!) and not asking erb to collapse whitespace, yeah, you'd get a ton of empty lines.

Oh god. If that's true, this site is an untemplatted nightmare under the covers. Worst case: "Hey, can we change 'Latest News' to just 'news?'" "Sure - just edit line 6643, but don't throw in a syntax error or you'll break the *entire f'ing site.*"

I'm glad this exists but will probably never visit it.

so they have plenty of time to plan the (seemingly) minor but maddeningly frustrating ways they'll deviate from the standard.

I was talking with a non-technical apple fangirl right after the iPad announcement. She was curious as to my opinion about it, given my geek status.

I told her I wasn't that interested, mainly because I'm not that interested in apple products. I'm more concerned about controlling my means of production (I build stuff on free software) and in protecting/fostering software freedom. I went into a short diatribe about how more and more our lives are dependent on software, and if that software isn't open you're beholden to the interest that created it, etc. Apple is no friend of software freedom in my opinion.

Her response was "I don't care about freedom, I just like how the pretty my iPhone is. What do you say to someone like me?" She didn't say it confrontationally, it was a sincere response.

My response was "I'm really the wrong guy to talk with you about this." She's totally bought into the "magic", and all reason is out the window. I happen to think there are better devices on better networks, but suggesting that to her would be tantamount to blasphemy.

You can't reason with this kind of emotion. Apple's good at engendering it. In the face of fanboy fanaticism, I find myself just giving up and saying "I don't really care what YOU use as long as you don't force it on me."

My favorite from a past employer - one of these PCI scanning companies asked us to take down our iptables rules for a set time period while they scanned us. That's right, they wanted us to be less secure while they checked how secure we were.

We were eventually able to get an ip range from them, but not until we fought them a bit. They *would not* do the scan unless we took down our firewall. I wanted to just REJECT everything but 80 and 443 and not tell them, but the higher-ups told me to play along.

Anyway - the whole idea felt really ... wrong. And they didn't point out anything useful, either.

A few basic definitions to make this post clearer:
participant: student accepted into the program
sponsoring organization: pretty obvious one, the organization sponsoring the participants
mentor: the person from the sponsoring organization delegated to manage GSoC participants

I'm pretty psyched. I've got two students to mentor on two different projects - I think it's going to be a great summer.

GSoC is a brilliant program on google's part - they are transparent about their aims: to get the "sponsors" to evaluate the participants so google can think about hiring them.

Google avoids headhunter fees, gets an in-depth real-world evaluation with a significant codebase to review and open-source projects get quality work.

Google may still pwn my datas, but hey: this is clearly not evil.