Metalinks should be the way to download big files, they might include a torrent, might not, but it works better. It just needs more adoption in browsers. Standardized as RFC 5854.

somewhere is a rather long explanation about their hardware - on youtube ^^ gigabyte built customized mainboards for them. optimized for speed, and either a lot of ram or a lot of harddisks - and no graphics, sound or other silly things. they do UPS right on the board (top boxes in picture 2) and yes, i think it's cheaper. they might fail more often, but they can repair and reuse them!! everything is their hands and they have full control!

+1 to Sage http://www.sagemath.org/ from me, too. You are always limited by these tiny utilites and you are not able to program with them easily like with Sage - since it is based on Python.

you know, one of the main reasons google is scanning books, is, to feed them into an AI !

i got a hp 2140 and well, they (hp) put suse sled 10 on it. it was terrible slow, old software, and even the webcam didn't work! then i tried ubuntu's netbook remix based on upcoming jaunty. well, it was much faster, up to date software, webcam and everything else worked. wlan connected much faster (took up to 2 min on sled 10) only problem: the kernel (2.6.28) can't boot if the DC power is plugged! http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12984 i really want linux since i only use linux, but it is a bit hard to go mainstream based on such a level of quality... preinstalled linux is horrible and the more recent software has bugs.

spoiler, i'm a gnome fan, but not only because it is simple and i don't have to think about how to use it (after about 10 years of linux experience i want to focus on other things than silly desktop effects). I recently got kde 4.1 here at my office and the first thing which was really annoying is, that the "Dolphin" file manager eats about 200mb of ram almost instantly. That's simply not acceptable and is only the tip of the iceberg. At gnome, things are reduced to fit their purposes, repsond faster, eat less resources. Therefore i think, kde has a really long way to go and I don't think that gnome's gradual way has any problems for the next years... Netbooks and web-applications will demand new features and gnome is well prepared.

i hope thats sarcasm. open source means that you actively build something on your own. watching tv is just consuming and passive. i prefer active.

type in x, highligh it, menu: insert > object > formula (iirc there is a shortcut for that) and then click on it and edit the formula to "overline {x}" click somehwere else and you are done

back before 2000, google was choosen as the search results provider vor yahoo. they helped google, now they want to give back. this deal wasn't about google gets yahoo,just about showing ads along a page, only bottom right iirc, and nothing more - for their mutual benefit. (i.e. yahoo doesn't have the technology to show ads for the long tail of less important keywords and therefore less ads to display)

i think there is a refund, so no real damage ... but i hope for an update to this story, i.e. a new delivery date.

no, but that's interesting! even if this is a new browser, firefox could still benefit via open source. chrome uses mozilla code and well, good developers are normally more exited with new projects than maintaining an old one ;)