When did Slashdot become conservative? After seeing all of those posts supporting Mozilla for firing their CEO a few days ago for supporting anti-gay causes, I figured that most Slashdotters were left of center.

Instead of building a giant floating barge as a sales tool, perhaps Google should have think about building a giant floating apartment buildings out in the Pacific for their employees.

The cost per square foot would probably be lower for their employees than a San Francisco apartment, and they wouldn't have to put up with San Francisco's ridiculous tax laws and building regulations. Besides, the commute to Mountain View by boat would beat taking a bus on the 101!

Which is great, until the update breaks XOrg and then you spend the next hour in single user mode editing configuration files in vi to get it working right again.

True Ubuntu story... thanks to those wonderful nVidia "Optimus" drivers.

Yeah, but he'll probably be able to keep his job as long as he wasn't dumb enough to publically say anything bad about gays.

Seriously, now is time for businesses to get OUT of Bitcoin and not be trying to get more of it.

In case you haven't noticed, the value of Bitcoin has dropped by more than half over the past three months. Between the MtGox scandal, the Bitcoin bans in Russia and China, and the draconian new IRS regulations, I'm amazed that it's still trading in the $500 range. It sure as hell don't see it coming back to $1,000 soon, that's for sure.

So, you're trying to tell me that the dozens of ATM manufacturers out there ALL decided to make the same bad decision and use XP Pro instead of Embedded, which has longer term support AND has a cheaper per seat license? I doubt it. I'm sure that some did, but I'd like to think that most of these guys would be smarter than that.

It's not. These systems are probably using XP Embedded, which is a hardened version or Windows XP with longer term support. Hell... I'd bet that almost all of them have explorer completely disabled and boot right into the ATM application. They probably wouldn't be Internet facing, either.

Last I heard, XP Embedded is supported until the end of 2016. It's not time panic... yet.

I don't really think that they got that close. The OLPC was supposed to be $100, and it never got down to less than $200 after several years after the initial promise.

That said, it help to launch the $300 netbook trend, soon followed by $100 7" Android tablets and cheap Windows based laptops. All of those caught on far better than OLPC did, and probably helped to get technology into low income households far better than the original project.

Even the creator of the test admits that any average user will probably not come anywhere close to 500 TB of writes during the lifetime of their 256 GB SSD.

Someone like Backblaze might if they used the SSD as a cache drive for a RAID array, but using a TLC based drive for that purpose is pretty foolish.

I guess that IBM's customers can now stop worrying about the NSA planting bugs in their servers and worry about the Chinese government doing it instead :)

Or (more likely) you're a nerd with a small horde of Bitcoin who wants as much positive publicity for the currency as possible.

I'm thinking that Slashdot should start requiring Bitcoin article posters to disclose how much Bitcoin they have before publishing the article. CNBC requires someone to disclose that their firm owns 5,000 shares of stock XYZ when they go on air and proclaim how great stock XYZ is... why not require the same level of transparency here?

We should really do a release date pool, and make our best educated guesses as to when Windows 9 will ship.

Will it be like Windows Vista and takes years longer than the original estimate, or will it be more like Windows 7 and be a release with minor changes that ships on time?

My money is on November 6, 2014, and that it will be little more than a UI refresh for Windows 8.1.

I do not think that Bitcoin (or any cryptocoin for that matter) will be a good method for payment transfer until prices stabilize. As long as the price of Bitcoin can swing as much as plus/minus 50% in a day (as it did several times in 2013), no sane person would use it a big ticket purchase.

If given a choice, I'd imagine that Red Hat would have users choosing CentOS than Ubuntu if they are looking for a free Linux distribution with longer term support. At least Red Hat can then give them the option to easily upgrade to RHEL without forcing them to reinstall their systems.

Switching between the two distributions (or even Scientific Linux) is already as easy as switching repos and updating a few branding specific packages. I'd imagine that Red Hat would make the process even easier to do so in the next release.