Actually I find this potentially quite cool. Not as much for the power source, but the size. Since most mATX boards don't come with mini PCIe slots, if you want to use an SSD drive you need a 2.5" drive or a PCIe card with a mini-slot on it. Both are much larger than a DIMM option.

And with 50gb, this would be very useful in a media box streaming from a server. Now only if the price could come down.

My 4x4 group (hot4x4.ca) uses VHF almost exclusively due to its reach above and beyond CB. Cell phones usually don't work where we travel either. Depending on the terrain, we can reach over 75kms from each other on just the 2m band w/o a repeater. This only requires a technician (basic) license as well.
Add in the APRS + Garmin GPS, and your rig turns into a mobile GPS transmitter. We then can track each other, which makes it really easy to find each other. APRS also allows us to send text messages via a p2p network of Ham Radios. Example: we had guys in Reno who we needed to contact because we broke a part on the Rubicon. Couldn't reach them via radio, but with APRS, our txt msgs could be relayed.
None of this requires anything but the first class license. Its an awesome hobby and there is a lot you can do with it, in addition to Geek cred and ecomm or search/rescue.

Oh its no joke. You really haven't been to an Amateur Radio meetup before... ;-)
Hams make the Slashdot community look normal!
73
-KF7FJM

Thats just false.

If you're a small company selling some products, ubercart and drupal is for you. You can see a good list of sites using it now.

the ONLY time I'd recommend someone spending money to develop their own ecommerce system is if they have something extremely customized--$million+ sites... NewEgg for example... and even then, the amount of money and time to make a 'custom' cart system could be cut by spending that time on extending the drupal and ubercart frameworks.

A big piece missing from Magento is the content management portion. There has been talk about integrating Magento as a third party add-on to drupal, but its so different in how it handles content, that it doesn't really work.

A decent alternative is Ubercart and Drupal. Ubercart, while not the best example of -good- drupal code, it is getting better, and d7uc is planning on bringing much of the code to drupal standards. One big plus about ubercart is its extensibility. Despite it being a bloated shopping system (built for a mom-and-pop shop, similar to magento), it is easy to override functions and get it to do what you want. Ubercart is also used extensively on major websites, almost everything that uses drupal 6 and ecommerce.

In the dark days of ubercart, or when I'm banging my head on a problem that cannot be easily solved with it, I've looked to magento, but then came running back.

As opposed to building your own website, or using RoR/Plone to build a site, which cannot be easily checked for security updates? no thanks.

Drupal has a dedicated security team which is proactive on maintaining secure code. One reason the white house gave for using drupal is because of its diligence to security.

Drupal also encourages and has best practices that -most- modules (especially the most popular ones) will weed out the most obvious security issues such as input sanitization, SQL injection, etc. While its not perfect, its -much- more secure than your own implementation.

When your code is exposed to the web, you always must be on watch. No code is perfectly secure, and to think otherwise is naive.

Acquia is not a fork, its a distribution of drupal core + the most popular contrib modules
Drupal core can be thought similar to the Linux Kernel, whereas modules represent the packages that make up a distribution of drupal.

Mollom and TinyMCE work great together

With ultimate flexibility comes an interesting learning curve. But thats what documentation is for.

Wonder if a module is used in drupal? you can look at its usage statistics. Want to do something in drupal? if you google it, usually someone else has already done it and in many cases have a screencast to go along with it.

"How will Acquia keep up with the rapid evolution of Drupal core and modules?"
This question addresses the upgrade path for a site. Like linux (or windows), modules are constantly evolving. Its hard for corporate customers to know if the new version will break things. By using a distribution like Acquia drupal, they do the testing to make sure everything works together.

From your comments, it sounds like your experience with drupal is somewhat new. Spend some time on IRC, going to drupal meetups, drupalcon, or take a lullabot course.

While some of your points (forum module) are valid, the part of needing PHP or that $$$$ is better spent on a closed source alternative is BS. If you want to create a simple family website, you can goto Acquia.com, download acquia drupal, which has all the modules you need for a simple family site, blog, image site, etc. There are tons of howtos, videos, etc that will teach you how to create the site without touching one line of code.

Most large shops are going drupal because they'd rather spend their $$$$ on developing custom cool things for the site instead of spending it on the closed-source CMS. And, once the site is deployed, the shop has a very large community to draw from for upgrades, changes, bug fixes, etc. They can even goto a different dev team who speaks drupal and not be tied into the company that originally built the site.

The White House, Sony, Lifetime, The Onion, Popular Science, Harvard, etc have PLENTY of money and all choose to use Drupal.

and if you don't know what 'bing' is, just google it!

OMG.

I recall seeing images like this mouse back in High school health class...

right, thats what genital herpes looks like!