Basically nVidia did what was best for their business, and best for their customers that want to get work done.

read as: Good enough for those not doing any own software development and/or bugreporting.

With closed source parts of your system you can never be sure where the rare crash came from. You cannot recompile the driver with safety barriers (_FORTIFY_SOURCE, mudflap, valgrind...), hardware watchpoints trap in binary code you cannot easily verify...

This results in unstable software commonly found on closed source platforms as nobody can provide reliable software there.

SIP (its STUN support works only with a luck).

Besides any service providing = servers which I run some for local stuff even on my notebook.

So I have to square root the billion pixels first and guess the painting size or guess the parameters of "an average digital camera"... Why they just cannot say the DPI? slashdot is a technical magazine or - ok, it is no longer.

So what's left of GNU code now?

Choose any two GNU packages on your system. That is still more than that one Linux kernel.

what is wrong (philosophically, security-wise, or wishing leprosy on oneself, etc.) with installing Moonlight

That you may get sued (=Fedora forbidden item).

Calling Fabrice Bellard "a French computer programmer"? Is it a joke?

Do you chase web hits? Who cares about Windows, moreover together with Apache httpd?

Do you call GPLv3+ gnash plugin an extension or workaround? What is a proprietary Flash player else than an extension? And what 3rd-party player are you talking about?

slashdot in recent years does not expect you would not run Windows as your host OS (to play with that Linux game as the guest OS).

Android uses *just* Linux. Applications depend primarily on userland libraries which together with the Linux kernel are called as whole GNU/Linux OS.

There are really _three_ different pinouts, all the possibilities have been exercised. :-)

Using $HOME in CVS since 2001, it works perfectly, it is public:
cvs -d :pserver:pserver:@dyn.jankratochvil.net/cvs co nethome
Checking it out across the world on various machines. If I find I miss something on some host, I do `cvs update' by hand. Not a rocket science.
I have only one host I consider secure enough so there is no point in distributed mails.
I was using my Gecko bookmarks in $HOME but I had to create a small script to "normalize" them. Otherwise they contain a lot of useless info (timestamps, whether expanded etc.) making both history diffs useless and conflict merges difficult/impossible.

i686 is now for about 6 years a dead horse. GNU/Linux world keeps i686 ABI compatible, that means:

• cdecl calling convention - the stack passed arguments - terribly slow, MS-Windows world is using their stdcall/fastcall mess which is faster but not compatible with former cdecl. x86_64 uses registers passed arguments by default.
• PIC - position independent code. GNU/Linux requires all the shared libraries (=that is all the Firefox code) to be position independent which is very expensive on i686 and as it also costs even one register. Vs. MS-Windows relocate libraries at kernel so they do not use PIC. On x86_64 the new PC-relative addressing makes PIC the same cheap as normal code.
• 64bit data for free - 32bit code had to handle all 64bit values expensively in two registers
• Probably other x86_64 arch improvements I forgot about. (guaranteed SSE/SSE2/SSE3/others? I do not remember.)

Other points making x86_64 the only choice at the same time making more favors to F/OSS / GNU/Linux:

• address space - Applications today already face the 1GB/2GB limit of i686 32-bit addressing. x86_64 has no such limits in any way. There are no reasons to run F/OSS (GNU/Linux) code in 32-bit mode. Contrary to MS-Windows with everything distributed proprietary where no 64-bit alternatives commonly exist.
• Compiler tools development concentrates on x86_64, as proprietary code has more financial investments in the past this advantage whould vanish with x86_64 as F/OSS code has enough financial backing nowadays.

dd can do much more than cat. Just the original post did not use any of the features dd can do more so why to bother with the more complicated syntax of dd in such case.

Where do you people come up with this shit? So what if you "entropy" is "exhausted" (whatever that means).

OMG try to run it yourself first because you start throwing your shit around.

# cat /dev/random >/tmp/1 & sleep 10; ls -l /tmp/1
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 119 2009-05-15 15:47 /tmp/1

(One can also use the pv command etc.)

/dev/random is designed to be used only for initialization of pseudorandom generators (such as the one in glibc).