ugh.. how much I love <insert language of choice>. Slashdot is not unlike C++.. who uses HTML in comments anyway?

.. I want to start hacking around with it. But then I remember how much I love and I just don't care anymore.

I'm from the Netherlands and I did not know it aired on a public channel on the same day as in the US. I can't find any information about it either. All I know it airs on a premium channel 5 days after the US release, which is still not bad!

You have obviously never tried fitting the old Mac Pro on or under your desk. The thing's huge!

That's not really what workstation users do. They happily pay Apple, HP, Dell or whomever a premium to get a combination of hardware that's guaranteed to work. People that put things like cheap consumer SSD's in workstations get the short end of the stick in the end.

Give it another 20 years, it will get there!

My main work and home machines run Mac OS X, but I have a Fedora 18 (w/ Gnome 3) box on the side. I'm really impressed with how far Linux has come, but man.. if you think being an OS X user in a Windows world was hard 10 years ago try being a Linux user in an OS X/Windows world. Even though my main tools (Vim mostly) run fine on Linux, there's a lot of small things I miss from OS X. I'm not happy with the direction Mac OS X is going (especially how Apple keeps breaking the Unix side of things), but on the other hand I'm really glad that the OS has finally become sort of mainstream (in terms of software support etc.). Besides, I feel really comfortable using OS X, so I'm not switching for now. However I can heartily recommend you give Linux a try for 30 days, because it really has come a long way on the desktop.

The question is: can they survive without going (partly) Open Source? The target audience for these kind of pseudo-programming environments is pretty small, and there's no major platform without an free SDK. The learning curve for cross-platform programming using Java or QT is not that big, either. So I think it's a good move to start giving some of it away to attract more paying customers.

Yes, the US cellphone market is mind-boggling to me as a European as well. Land of the free, my ass!

When talking about large-scale websites the language is hardly relevent. There are as many high-traffic sites running on C#, Java, PHP or whatever. When facing large scale other factors play a much larger role. The only exception is when you're talking Facebook or Twitter scale: Facebook has practically reinvented PHP and also has some parts of their code in C (or C++, not sure) and Twitter made a switch from Ruby to Scala in order to handle the onslaught of users. The results mentioned in the article (accepting 2000 requests takes 600ms longer when using simple code) are not that interesting in this context.

Actually, all the DRAC Enterprise cards that I've worked with (say the last two or three generatios) have a dedicated ethernet port. The whole management card functions separately from the server, as it should. Sure, the remote console works through a Java Web Start application which seems kludgy but it has never failed me (much like pretty much all Dell server hardware we operate over here).

However I agree with you that a complete server would be a waste of resources for this scenario so it's kind of a moot point.

The fact that they found this box on the bottom of the Atlantic long after it's beacon died out and the fact that it's in good shape is just amazing. Let's hope they can figure out what happened.

The only locked phone I ever bought here in the Netherlands was a prepaid phone twelve years ago. Most phones that come with a subscription are unlocked here. For example: my Blackberry is T-Mobile branded, but it's not locked to the T-Mobile network.. I can use any SIM card I like in it.

If you do buy a simlocked phone, the carrier will supply you with an unlock code one year after purchase.