Now Watson has some data on what happens to a company when you cut the pay of its top-performing employees more than the lowest performing! *

* I'm talking about the regular employees who get ranked, not necessarily the exectives.

Well, the company in question did implement their graphics rendering engine (PostScript) as an interpreted language.

I got an nVidia ION-based Asus Aspire Revo PC a few years back. It worked fairly well, gets nice and warm, and is still in service as my Kodi box, NAS/backup server (eSATA+GbE with RAID) and secondary DNS/DHCP. It does leave out the PCI slots from the reference platform though.

I'm currently evaluating a $150 (from Fry's) Asus VivoPC as my next primary server. Dual core, hidden micro-PCIe, SATA and USB3. So far, so good.

When I got my first CD-ROM drive, it was half speed (75kB/s). Oh yeah! It was awesome—I wish I still had some of those early CD-ROM demos. (The Intel monk/book of the dead one sticks in my mind: it talked to you!)

I guess changing the calendar's "week view" from 7 days to 5 days is part of their 20% play-at-work scheme. (It also only displays a fixed time span, because who would want to see your appointments for the whole day?)

The telnet protocol can be made very secure with the right software in place.* But it's only useful when you have a pre-agreed algorithm.

* Use the data stream to carry benign traffic. Encode your critical message elsewhere, e.g., the inter-packet delays, typos, a secondary (intermingled) TCP stream, TCP retries, TCP checksum, window lengths, header packing.

The value you stated is complicated. Either

• Pay $1200/year for backups, where the availability of the data clearly didn't affect the viability of his business, or
• Pay $500 occasionally and in the process have plausible deniability for the data lost and an insurance claim.

Tough call, depending on his business.

The sentiment is sound, but in many cases, the RPi+storage+time costs more than the $500 ransom.

I went through two rounds of cataract correction surgery, so my medical plan allowed me to experiment a bit with replacement lenses. In the end, I found that a larger spread of focal range (top to bottom) suited me better (I think my original corrections were -4 to -3, and settled on -4 to -2). A also found I liked the "digital" layout (small infinity at the top, wide screen-distance, small near distance) over the standard layout (wide infinity, narrow mid, narrow near).

Kilobytes! You were lucky! In my day we 'ad to work with less that 1 kilobit and a 9 character display.

Skynet?

I run a Linux kernel on 4 out of the 5 PC/laptops I own, and spend 90% of my time screen-time on them. I organize my photos in <shameface>Adobe Photoshop Elements Organizer 8</shameface> on Windows. Elements can be made to tag the metadata into the JPEGs so that its database can be reconstructed just from the files, and it has a reasonable tagging interface. However, my photos probably only amount to 500GiB or so, going back to the 1990s, and I don't bother with raw, so my load isn't high.

I suspect FTDI's counter-argument would be:

It's mostly true. The early Gnome 3 annoyed me so much ("I want my clock on the bottom of the screen, dammit!") that I changed to KDE4 and XFCE (on low memory systems). KDE was infuriating, but once I'd figured out how to disable, e.g., Akonadai and Konqueror, I learned to like it. (Dolphin is good! Window title bars on the left edge is a godsend for widescreen use.) XFCE was similar enough to Gnome 2 for me not to notice it much.

I'm not sure I like the idea of rogue ATMs on the internal bank network.