It wasn't even for sale in my area until the USB problem had been fixed. Funny thing is I got a replacement one "new" for a friend whose kid wrecked the keyboard in late 2013 - the repair centre still had some unused.
The dismal battery life is with WiFi turned on, so it only lasts uncharged about a day at work with WiFi on or three days at home with WiFi off.
Something with the same form-factor and more modern (less hungry) hardware would be nice, even if it is android and not real linux.

"We get it, you're an idiot stuck in the past"

I get it, you're an idiot that can't be bothered to think critically, let alone even try refuting my points (all of which I can record video evidence of and shove right in your ignorant face) so all you can do is try to insult.

Well, while you think I'm stuck in the past - I own four of these.

I know what technology is worth purchasing and using. Smartphones are not one of those technologies. They've been nothing much more than a marketing gimmick, a dangerous distraction for those on the road, and a means for ever-increasing privacy invasion. Base fucking line price for a phone now days without contract runs you almost $500. I can get portable computer hardware ten times as powerful for the same price that actually performs multitasking.

Let's put down an example, starting with iOs. I used to do some side courier stuff for a university. I log into a webpage on an iPhone, find my order, load it up, then I tell Apple Maps to direct me to the address. Okay, now that I'm there, I go back to the webpage, only to find out that fucking Safari INSISTS on reloading the page. Except now I'm in an area where there's NO CELLULAR SIGNAL and thus I obviously can't refresh the page, which has gone blank because Apple is too fucking stupid to have any sort of intelligent swapfile. Now I can't get my order back up on the fucking screen and I have to step outside to get a signal and bring the order page back up.

ABSOLUTELY FUCKING USELESS. Meanwhile, I can do the same thing with a laptop, and I NEVER have to worry about losing the webpage when I go look at another program. And I haven't SINCE THE DAYS OF THE PENTIUM 2.

Smartphones are poorly-designed, loaded with gimmicks, and for the price you pay, you get absolutely shit performance and usability in comparison to any other piece of real computer hardware near the same price.

went from over three minutes to down to less

Something is definitely seriously wrong in that case. Are you sure it wasn't a change to autofs to mount them on demand instead of boot or using more correct NFS mount options that made the difference?

The other bits are interesting and make your point but that final one is a somewhat pathological case.

As for my example - a eeepc with an SSD but not a very quick CPU. Boot time with the stock distro (xandros) was about 15 seconds, around 45 with a cut down recent Fedora with hardly anything starting. It now has FreeBSD10 on it.

Yes - the correct behavior as Lennart sees it is to halt and wait for the user to insert a rescue CD.
I don't see that as correct myself but he has a desktop perspective inspired by growing up after Win95 and not paying much attention to server environments.

There is simply no way human beings can sort through that much data. That means relying on gadgets and software to do the sorting for the humans. Anyone who manages big data can tell you how corrupt most data sets really are. Names spelled different ways, bits of information incorrectly transcribed, copy errors, format errors, import errors are all low probability events but, when you're dealing with billions of records, there are a lot of them. Just in general, gadget security doesn't work.

In nearly every terrorist event that's happened in the U.S., the FBI had tips from alert citizens. That was true for 9/11 and almost all of them in between. The FBI even interviewed the Boston Marathon bombers. HUMINT works.

Funny that the FBI screw ups don't get more media attention. In nearly every case they didn't effectively use the information they had, so how is more information going to make things better?

Modern phones and tablets have thge same problem as PCs - they fall victim to loads of crap and bloatware. Don't burden your smartphone with shit and it will stay stable. If you're having trouble doing that use one with a smaller softewaremarket such as the Jolla. If you're unsure about which phone to take I'd actually recommend that one.

Considering how it blocks (with no output as to why) if a filesystem is not present is it REALLY doing enough in parallel or just enough to have race conditions in the binary logs?

I like the idea you're suggesting and it was actually something that people used to say the US had to some extent. The US was called a "laboratory of democracy" in that we had 50 largely independent governments that could do things in their own ways. And you could judge the success or failure of any given idea just by looking at the before and after data. And you could even see other states doing contrary things and again look at before and after data... and then there would be states that did nothing at all and again you could see before and after data.

So much of it is federal now that there's way to do any of that. It is everyone or no one with no control group.

Seriously. There are a small number of people whose opinion is worth listening to even when it disagrees with the groups managing almost every single major distribution of Linux. Granted, some of them will be on slashdot. But definitely not anywhere near the number that pop in to these threads and whine. I use Linux to get things done. I have also used FreeBSD quite extensively, but there are a number of applications that don't quite support FreeBSD, and there is no equivalent of Red Hat. I plan to deploy Ceph soon for example for a storage cluster, and I want to be solving issues related to making Ceph work effectively, not spend time getting it up and running, compiling things myself. So I'll go with a *nix distribution that Ceph is most extensively tested against (RedHat or Ubuntu when I last checked).

If you want to build Debian without systemd and deal with all the niggly annoying issues that will come out of that and get progressively worse, go for it. Just don't pretend it's a viable option for anyone trying to get shit done, trying to keep systems running, trying to get systems up and going in short time. Sure, if you have an abiding interest in operating systems, love compiling kernels and creating custom builds of your favourite distribution, go for it. But the idea that any organization using Linux for critical systems would consider rolling their own distro to avoid systemd is ridiculous. Systemd won. Get over it. Discussions about how it is better or worse are mostly academic at this point. We are approaching almost a year since RHEL switched - if it was that catastrophically bad, we would know by now.

I just searched to see if I could buy any of those as stickers... none exist anywhere according to google.

Thus I conclude that you must eat at least one bucket of dicks to repent.

You may use your condiment of choice.

I've never seen any of those as bumper stickers in my life.

What is more, the repetition was to make clear the logical distinction of it because it sounds like something else that is completely different.

You really don't think energy costs will go up over time? Ironically, the only way they wouldn't is if we committed to more renewables.

You have to finish the sentence before you can understand it. I'd bet you just interrupt in the middle of sentences all the time, and thus fail to understand what people are telling you by preventing them from actually finishing a complete thought.

If you go back and read the complete sentence, which expresses a complete thought, then it makes perfect sense.

You've proven full well that I do.

But you're wrong.

Cost-effective for who, and on what basis?

It's not cost-effective for them, because they don't have a secondary use for the battery.

You still have failed to support your argument in the slightest. We're waiting, though we're not holding our breath, because we want to live.

most importantly, things are improving.

They certainly have to continue to improve before systemd becomes a more worthwhile option than the things it is replacing.
The only problem systemd solves is to replace things so old that they are maintained by people that have been coding for longer than Lennart Poettering.