You don't say what your budget is, but good, sturdy workbenches (like these) with plenty of outlets for power supplies, scopes, meters, etc. as well as built in drawers and cabinet space.

If you are looking for suggestions on equipment, power supplies like the Topward 6000D series or similar (multiple output, adjustable, current limiting supplies) are invaluable. Good o-scope, handheld multimeter, etc. if you don't already have that stuff.

There have been attempts at arguing "look and feel" copyrights. It's not clear to me where caselaw stands (see Lotus v. Borland and Apple v. Microsoft, both of which you could read either way in this case) and how the DMCA affects that, but it definitely seems to me that it is not completely obvious that there is no infringement, in which case (IANAL) Namco isn't wrong to file a takedown notice, and certainly isn't doing so in bad faith.

No, incorrect. This is a modification to your .bashrc, which is (already) run every time you start a bash process, within that process (i.e., not a new process). Nothing needs to be spawned on every single process.

Admittedly the bash script does spawn some processes, but a) that's the way .bashrc works, and you have dozens of those in there, and b) it's only one process, a mkdir. The echo and the conditional run within bash itself.

The way that the configuration works, whether done in the kernel or in your .bashrc, is to associate all processes spawned from a single bash shell with a single new scheduling group. This gets you better performance when you're running processes from terminals, by associating logically-similar groups of processes in the kernel instead of letting it see all the processes as a giant pile.

The intended use case, which is pretty clear from the LKML discussion, is to make performance between something intensive (like a compilation) in a terminal and something non-terminal-associated (like watching a movie) better-balanced.

You can explain a good chunk of this as the result of Akamai's world-wide content caching/load balancing solution. The default Akamai plan doesn't get you SSL support, but the thousands and thousands of web servers they have (which host a good 10% of the Internet's web traffic, last I heard) will all reply on the SSL port, and will present a certificate for an Akamai domain name, whether you connect to ocw.mit.edu or www.whitehouse.gov or www.mtv.com or whatever it may be.

In general, this can also be explained by servers that happen to listen on port 443 but aren't intended to do SSL.

(who happens to be esr)

You mean Bruce Perens, for what it's worth. Other than that completely agreed with you.

Informative? What the hell? Have you guys ever been to debian-legal? You will never find a more lacking-in-legal-training-whatsoever hive of scum and villainy. This is the place that honestly can't decide if a mere "You can use this code in whatever way you want, as long as you don't try to claim you wrote it." suffices for free software.

The GPL doesn't require that hardware that has GPL code be modifiable to include updated versions of code. Build systems are a distraction here: a more direct form of the problem is that the GPL code is burned into ROM, and even the GPLv3's Tivoization section (number 6, paragraph starting "If you convey...") explicitly permits that. It would be dumb if it didn't. While it may well be the case that for GPLv3 (and not GPLv2) failing to give you a usable build environment for compiling modifying code so you can run it on your "User Product" is a violation, this is forgetting a large part of the purpose of free software.

The point of free software is that the software, the code, is free for the community to use. Thinking about free software as simply the ability to modify code within its original context causes us to forget opportunities for reusability that benefit the entire free software community, well past the lifetime of this one device, and encourages behavior where modified code isn't usable on other devices or in entirely different contexts. I've written a bit more about this on my blog, with some examples of times when thinking about "free software"/"open source" only within the context of the original product has caused the free software ecosystem as a whole — the thing that's causing large companies to want to embed free software in their hardware devices in the first place — to be left behind.

Some group named "Hacktivismo" decided to make a license that protected human rights. GNU, rightly,
called it out on not being a free software license (and it's not free in Debian's eyes or open source in OSI's eyes either):

If we were ever going to make an exception to our principles of free software, here would be the place to do it. But it would be a mistake to do so: it would weaken our general stand, and would achieve nothing. Trying to stop those particular activities with a software license is either unnecessary or ineffective.

[...] Also, at least under US law, a copyright-based source license can't restrict use of the program; such a restriction is not enforcible anyway. [...]

The one I've used is called HaRET, which is both a debugger-ish thing that lets you play with physical memory and GPIO ports, and a LOADLIN-style bootloader.

For $300? (Or $200 used?)

Do you know where to get this book for a normal price? I've been looking forward to reading it, but I can't convince myself to spend $300 on it and there's no way I can get anyone else to...

That's a patent application, not a patent. It was denied.

No, there is a big difference between Near-infrared (0.75 - 1.4 um) -- which is what CCD is sensitive to without a filter -- and Far-infrared (8 - 15 um) -- which is the thermal imaging range.

Theora was based on one of On2's earliest codecs. VP6 & VP7 have been far more successful and are even used as the Flash video codecs. If Google is acquiring On2, it could mean that they're looking to open up the formats that have defined Flash as the media player of choice.

(Sorry, this is somewhat offtopic, but it was the first thing I thought of when I saw the comparison between Windows XP and Windows 7.)

I once saw someone here on Slashdot mention that Microsoft should not have shipped a 32-bit version of Vista, opting instead to push only the 64-bit version. While it seemed like an odd statement at the time (despite the fact that my home XP machine was an AMD64 processor), I find myself agreeing with it on Windows 7.

As it stands today, 32-bit Windows is quickly becoming too small for many business and industrial uses, and it's very affordable to build a high-performance home machine with more than 4GB of RAM. (Case in Point.) In fact, with intensive web applications and sophisticated desktop tools (yeah, some of them are bloated) chewing more memory than ever before, it just doesn't make sense to get anything less than 4GB (nay, 3GB if you're running Windows 32-bit!) except for a few edge cases.

Unfortunately, Windows has been kind of lagging on the 64-bit front. By treating it as sort of a bastard child (like they treated all their non-i386 NT versions), Microsoft managed to ensure that hardware manufacturers wouldn't make an effort to support 64-bit windows in a non-server environment. Which is frustrating as I've started bumping up against that once-awesome 4GB barrier.

In an attempt to turn this into a slightly more useful conversation rather than a one-sided rant, I was wondering if I could get some opinions on using virtualization as a solution? With Windows' poor track record as a 64-bit OS, I have been thinking about running a 64-Bit Unix and virtualizing 32-bit windows for backward compatibility. I've already had some success with virtualizing Windows 7 on a MacBook, and have even been able to get desktop integration working. (Quite spiffy that. Though the two interfaces occasionally confuse my wife. She's the primary user of Windows, needing support for some specialized programs with no real alternatives available.)

Does anyone here have experience with setting up a system like this? Do you use Xen, VMWare, Sun VirtualBox/OpenxVM, or some other solution? What do you use as your primary OS? Linux has come a long way, but the upgrade treadmill is still frustrating. Especially with the seemingly regular ABI upgrades. Does anyone use [Open]Solaris x86_64 as a host? Do you have 3D Graphics completely disabled, or have you found a good way to allow all OSes solid and reliable access to the underlying graphics card? Do you bother with mounting virtual shared drives to move data between the OSes, or do you have a home NAS for storing data? (I'm leaning toward a NAS myself.)

Just a few thoughts, anyway. Thanks in advance for experiences & suggestions! :-)