Beats me, you'd have to ask on the coreboot mailing list.
My best guess, though, is yes. (Excluding, of course, Windows startup.)
Hard to say. I'm pretty sure the 3 second time had a lot of "typical" linux components stripped out, but note that you won't get a shell until everything's finished loading, while X can be started in parallel with other things and be usable while other components start. I believe some work was done that got it under 5 seconds from init to usable. There's still the bios time (0 with a tricked-out coreboot setup) and the time while the kernel starts up before init (this takes 2-3 seconds for me, no idea what "normal" or "fast" is). That adds up to ~7-8 seconds.
One thing to note is that storing the kernel directly in EEPROM lets you skip the bootloader entirely. Bootloaders are usually pretty fast, but they usually have a programmed delay of a few seconds to let you choose a kernel or whatever.
I'd say media files (and software, too) expand to take up as much space as internet bandwidth allows. Back in the day, if you wanted online video, it was all tiny
And of course, very much involved is packrat tendencies: we'd much rather buy another hard drive than have to delete stuff, even if we're done with it.
They're not a virus risk due to autorun if you, y'know, use a sensible OS.
This is slashdot, man, get with the program.
Huh. I dropped my OLPC from about 4 feet (a little less, maybe 3.5 with some forward momentum too) just a week ago. It bounced to about 1.5-2 feet, then landed again. Outdoors, hard asphalt. No damage except a tiny depression in the plastic on one corner.
Not the first time I've dropped it, either. Only thing I've broken from a drop is a tiny chunk of plastic off the headphone jack--in a ~6 foot drop onto a tile floor that hit the wall and my leg and thus didn't get the full force, but did manage to bend the 1/8th inch headphone connector.
Sounds like Dell has some catching up to do.
UNIX is hot. It's more than hot. It's steaming. It's quicksilver lightning with a laserbeam kicker. -- Michael Jay Tucker