Yeah, for previous versions of windows it was "the first thing I do with a new PC is install fresh without all the add-on bloatware/spyware"
With win8+, more bloat is built in

Then again, the first thing I do after installing KDE on Linux is to disable Nepomuk and Akonadi... for similar performance reasons.

Since we live in the land of monopolied "Dominate and crush", we'll never know, as it actively prevents some alternatives from ever gaining growth.

Honestly, for my work stuff though I'd at the very least like to see something like a self-hosted Google-Docs combined with versioning instead of the aweful sharepoint we use.

If the government continues along the current path, your daughters WILL be growing up in a fascist dicatorship!

It's why I really prefer
    rm [path] -rf

Linux allows this, but the last BSD I used required me to put the arguments before the path
    rm -rf [path]

Why is this bad? Well, if accidentally tap enter or something akin to that while partway through typing a path, say goodbye to anything that's along the way!

Oh there's nothing wrong with the card that would require "baking" etc, it's purely a driver issue. They fixed a brightness-button issue and in turn something sets the backlight to 0 on my model.

One of the reasons why I will probably not buy an ATI/AMD (for graphics), is that support for older hardware is pretty terrible. I have an Asus laptop which worked *beautifully* in both Windows/Linux.
Apparently, some people (not me) had issues with brightness control not working on the fglrx driver. AMD fixes that, and on my laptop (and others, according to Google) the backlight breaks. As soon as X initializes my backlight goes dark. In a bright room I can barely see that X otherwise started successfully and is displaying a login window.. It's been over a year. I've seen lots of chatter on fixes for the brightness-control button, but pretty much zip about the broken backlight.

I can use the Radeon driver so that X will work, but video is choppy and since I'm working on actually developing GL code, it's pretty much useless for that. So... core i7 processor, lots of RAM, decently powerful GPU, and a farked video driver that renders the whole thing useless.

I had actually been migrating more towards AMD from nVidia since their graphics drivers had shown promise since ATI was acquired, but frankly the nightmare of bug-support is pushing me back towards nVidia. It especially sucks for a laptop since I can't exactly replace the GPU on what it otherwise fully functional hardware.

Currently I'm picking at firegl_public.c and related modules attempting to merge the 13.25 driver with the 8.960 driver (I've been told that reverting to the older driver will allow the backlight to work, but in my case it won't compile under DKMS).

To any AMD Linux driver devs listening: I would be happy to work with you on this. Hell, I can ship you the damn laptop for a few months if you believe that would help develop a driver that works again.

So has the Westboro Baptist lopped off anyone's head because they were the wrong version of Christianity

Honestly, given the actions of the WBC, I'm surprised nobody has tried to off their leaders/members.

You don't even need to blow away the Linux partition. Just install to a 4GB USB stick and set that to be the first boot-device.

Quick, time to exchange my Bitcoins for Rubles and stock in Blackberry... oh wait.
Or maybe Canadian dollars... oh wait.

Like regular currencies or stocks, pseudo-currencies are also volatile.

Sure there is. A very short distance from where I am right now, there's a electronics hobby-shop that carries more than the rat-shack has in years. They seem to survive well enough by supplying parts to businesses as well as consumers, and offering repair services, etc. I don't live in a large city, but when I last did there were many such places.
You might not be able to get the part for $0.10, but if you're in a hurry the markup isn't too obscene, and if it is, well... then you've still got the option of online. The internet has just killed "20 days to order in our vastly overpriced kit", because now you can just direct-order the same online cheaper and sometimes faster.

Indeed. I am a Linux "professional". I am not an "expert", though some may call me that.
This is because I personally understand that while I know a lot about Linux and specifically about the systems I administer, there is so much more I don't know. Much of that is "stuff you don't need to know... until you do (which is unlikely, but possible)".

Whenever somebody in IT calls himself/herself an expert, I cringe, because there's *always* so much more you can learn. Hell, people are learning new tricks about systems they've been tending to for decades, especially when it comes to interaction with other systems.

Indeed, I've heard professionals in many industries call each other idiots, state that something is not possible, etc simply because they lacked a small bit of knowledge about a given situation/exception. Would you want to be tried by somebody who knows how "system X" works in an optimal situation, but doesn't take into account environmental circumstances?

This is actually a fairly reasonable request. There can be a big difference between

I'm going to kill that guy
VS
I'm going to kill that guy :-)

Even with the emoticon, a lot of context can still be lost, but they can help a bit.

Computer stick. Cute as a small computer. Useless as a firewall/router (what ethernet)?

Yeah, that was the part that turned me off too. It's not such a big deal for an internet firewall though. Even a realtek card can manage that in most cases.