Interesting idea. Thirty years ago many people were introduced to programming by printed (ink on mashed up trees) anthologies of programs that were generally around a page long (8.5 x 11). Don't know how pervasive the term was, but in my personal circles these programs were called "K-Byters" because they were ~1 K long (or less).

Breaking key-based encryption used to be considered hard to do. Bring more horsepower to bear, ie. a GPU, and today's Hard To Do turns into a Proof of Concept and eventually becomes tomorrow's Commonplace.

Because even after those in the know recognize a better value proposition there is significant latency before the rest of the world to catches up- decades in some cases.

I wouldn't build a castle and put the moat inside the castle wall either. Why manage 2 layers when one done right (external to the PC) is sufficient and the other one, even managed correctly could be doing effectively nothing - if there are OS vulnerabilities as we know some commonly deployed OSes exhibit.

Which is convenient because in ten years that might be the minimum power plant required to support a PC running the latest MS O/S.

Don't you get the Hyperbole Times? "Orders of magnitude" is the new "literally" when it comes to marketing's abuse of language (c.f. David Cross bit on the misuse of "literally").

Hey, physics geeks! "Sheet of glass" is not an appropriate unit of measurement to use in a conversation about the forces exerted & effects on an object when dropped, especially when, as already mentioned the material(s) are unspecified. Never mind of course that its marketing speak about a hypothetical object in the distant future (distant in the context of the applicable industry).

Isn't that Physics 101; using and being clear on units of measurement and the standards on which they're based?

Probably not; it's likely just the tip of the iceberg.

I think you should make a clicking sound. Let us know how it goes ... maybe upload a .wav?

I've been a Cyrus IMAP admin for over a decade and have experienced no problems with user email boxes in the 6 Gb - 8 Gb range or single imap boxes with > 1E+06 messages. Performance of large batch message operations is also satisfactory (ie. import, export). It's also very useful to have server side message tagging support (ie. like gmail). I've heard other similar reports regarding FOSS imap servers such as Dovecot & UW and there seems to be at least some consensus that they are easier to manage than Cyrus but I have no direct experience regarding the relative ease of administration. Running your own local Zimbra might be a nice starting point as well- gives you a bunch of personal productivity functionality in a single groupware app. I'm running my own Zimbra instance on a RackCloud server for $90/year (all-in) for exactly this purpose.

Depends on the specifics but sometimes video and, more often, wireless cards, functionality is hampered by lack of vendor participation in Linux driver development.

Should have added more specifics on the hardware. I used a QC Phenom MB w/4GB RAM. Because the on-board NIC was garbage I threw a server grade Intel NIC in as well. The entire box, not counting HD's was done for $800 and can handle streaming multiple standard DVD resolutions fine and will stream at least one HD file (Blue Ray quality) without issue.

To serve as a storage vault to work with my XBMC Live box, I threw a low-end PC with a high end SATA storage card + 6 2TB HD's in my basement. I used freeNAS as the OS. Works great- ZFS is da bomb when it comes to large storage systems.

While the parent poster didn't mention games, a lot of the recent award winning games that truly do innovate (vice this year's fresh paint on leading Windows titles) are cross-platform. And of course Firefox, Filezilla, Thunderbird, Google & Open Office have all been complete flops- they'll never draw a crowd. MS is losing 10% browser share a year. It won't be long now.

Speaking as a developer I could never go back to MS-Land. I've grown fond of a desktop that responds when I click instead of searing the Windows hourglass into my retina.

Yes that's right: "Those bastards." Though I believe you're being sarcastic, your bullet points make it easy to clearly explain that while what MS does is not uncommon, it does make them bastards. All of your bullet points are examples of value added for consumers. The propaganda they spread regarding their stance toward Open Source (which are just words not action and frequently a position they reverse on) is an example of them using deceit to positively influence the market's perception of MS (presumably to gain market share) which at the end of the day probably takes value away from consumers. I for one prefer honesty in my vendors.