Being a Slackware user for many years, I went the MythTV+Slackware route when I got my HTPC up and running. One day I managed to totally break my system and decided "What the hell, let's give MythBuntu a go". What used to be a 2 hour+ set up time went down to 10-15 minutes. I actually switched my server over to Ubuntu soon afterwards and haven't looked back.

MythTV and Ubuntu (and mediabuntu) marry well together on both the backend and frontend. It's worth an afternoon to try out if you have the hardware around. I used nfs instead of smfs to connect the two, but the principles the same. Plus I have additional "TV" sets all around the house with dual booting partition. Those took a little extra time to set up but it is a bonus.

Some of the new mini SSD based machines (Like the Acer Revo) might be the way to go for the frontend. They're powerful enough and can playback HD video. MythTV works great on my Asus EEE 901 running Ubuntu Netbook remix.

I question the validity of any site that thinks gallons and liters are interchangable

I'm about to nitpick, but....

Both of these statements are true: "The well has pumped millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf". "The well has pumped millions of liters of oil into the Gulf".

They are comparable if we're talking order of magnitude. I know 3.79 != 1, but when we're talking about "millions of" in a vague sense where nobody really knows what's going on, the real difference is between 10^6, 10^7, or 10^8. M*10^6 and N*10^6 are relatively interchangeable. If we knew that the spill was exactly x*10^y litres, I'd be agreeing with you. /Did both mathematics and physics in university, and appreciates both sides of the argument...

The journey to the moon happened in a rocket built jointly by Boeing, Douglas, and North American, in a spacecraft built by Boeing, and the landing on the moon happened in a spacecraft built by Grumman. Even those spacesuits with the NASA patches were manufactured by International Latex Corp.

If NASA is paying the bills for a Mars mission and providing the Astronauts, everything will still have NASA patches on it, regardless of who builds the rocket.

Almost, but not quite. We use wood as if it were non-renewable. Certainly it will grow back if replanted and properly cultivated, but the "peak" principle of a limited resource still holds.

Add to this that as a species we desperately need land for food cultivation. We don't have enough right now, even with advanced farming techniques, to feed everyone. Not all harvested forests are replanted.

At some point we'll be able to harvest less wood than the year previous. Eventually it will go down and hopefully plateau. It won't be the same shape peak, but it will peak nonetheless.

Cool, thanks for the link..

Ironically also called "Pandora"

My point being that the Pandora comes with d-pad and 2 analog controllers built into the system as well as a full thumb keyboard. Certainly it's twice the weight and size (about the size of an original Nintendo DS), but with good reason.

It doesn't matter what either of us say, the market will be a final arbiter of this beastie...

"fitting in a pocket comfortably. Just add a game controller..."

I don't mean to sound too sarcastic, but if you have a link for a game controller that fits comfortably in a pocket, I'd like to see it.

"but where are the games?"

http://dl.openhandhelds.org/cgi-bin/pandora.cgi

It's an "open source" handheld with an eager development community, and games and other apps will come quickly once the hardware is released to the wild. By the time the pre-orders are complete and anyone not in the queue will be able to purchase one (and that will take a few months at this rate), there will be dozens of games available. Give it some time.

Looks like Gruso's blog got slashdotted pretty quickly.

Here's some more links to keep people occupied:

Official Site: http://www.open-pandora.org/
Wikipedia Page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora_(console)
Pandora forums on GP32X: http://www.gp32x.com/board/index.php?/forum/61-pandora/
Craig Rothwell's Twitter feed (all kids of pics there): http://twitter.com/craigix

Linux Software RAID5 has worked very well for me. Performance is decent (perfectly fine to play back and transfer 1080p video). I got one way back when 3x320GB was enormous and had a 1TB drive before they were remotely available.

Now I'm seriously considering 6x2TB for a 10TB RAID for my next server replacement. No need for an SSD for booting either, just set aside a tiny RAID1 partition (mirrored across all drives) for /boot and you're set. It boots and operates fast enough.

The one problem (as with any solution here) is that 10TB is nearly impossible to back up. Assume the data is lost in case of server hack/house fire, and back up that 50GB that's *really* important to removeable media offsite. I've got an external USB SATA drive desktop "plugin" that works well for larger file transfers. (And Hard Drives are now getting very close to DVDs in GB/$)

I'm sure someone will; pipe up about how SATA drives aren't stable enough for RAID. ZFS is the alternative, but I'm not sure what tools are available for Linux distributions.

DNA seems a likely possibility. It's by far the most unique thing on this planet, we're still finding medicines in trees in the rainforest we couldn't conceive to invent, and gene transfer is commonplace amongst single celled bacteria.

That being said, acquiring DNA from Earth species wouldn't require interstellar conquest. It's possible they'd arrive, take what they want, and then leave, mostly ignoring us.

I was thinking something just like this, though in a slightly different context.

One of the things that makes a hive-society so tightly knit is that unlike brothers and sisters, many of these hive animals share 3/4s of their DNA, rather than merely a half.

Dawkins actually argued in "The Selfish Gene" that hives should be possibly considered a single entity, housed in many physical bodies because the genetics are so common within the group.