the codecs and flash are a god sent sometimes. have a laptop with a dead hard drive?, you can burn a DVD-R and let it in the tray, yet still play mp3, movies and youtube. or I carry a live USB everyday, for installation but sometimes useful for a quick use.

I only briefly tested it, but the Mate edition looks excellent, it's not quirky. it's like the old gnome 2 is back, with no bugs and small applets such as xeyes. it's the editiion to use, works everywhere, no need for a 3D driver to run it. also in a funny way it feels lightweight nowadays, due to most other desktops being really bloated (or xfce not being that much lighter)

Especially awesome is, despite its Windows XP taskbar set up, with the big Mint menu, you can easily add a top panel if you wish, and choose your menu between three styles including the gnome 2 one.

I can't store 1TB of movies and music on the cloud, this would be a very high recurring fee and I would upload data at 120KB/s. a one-time fee for the HDD and another one for the backup HDD is cheaper. I still get to access files from my cheap ass NAS with VIA CPU, even though at 120KB/s from outside but when I get fiber it will be more like 10MB/s.

I do want to get a 4TB HDD for it, RAID is not so good as you still have to buy one or more backup drives so there aren't any savings. maybe put the OS on a SD card so that when the drive fails, my server willl still work. also I could host backups for a few friends on my huge disk - asking them to pay a bit for it.

it's not that minor, if you need to buy a new display for a toy you've just tripled its price instantly. this is why raspi is a no-go for poors, children and the third world.

the culprit is that you will likely have no video acceleration under linux.

actually, it's a recent thing but 8GB dimm prices have crashed as well. I can get 32GB for 200 euros, if that, and it can go in a regular motherboard with a low end CPU. lga 2011 will net you 64GB, with an i7 3820 and keeping everything cheap you almost build a complete PC with 64GB for 1000 euros.

Linux kernel does not have a standard ABI, in a sense that the way modules communicate with the kernel and each other is not fixed on binary level. Linux as an OS most certainly does have a standard ABI - how else would you be able to take a binary that was compiled 10 years ago (say, a proprietary game), and run it today?

I would love to be able to do that, but you can't anyway. every library under the hood will have changed several times over and you won't be able to run anything except a text adventure or some card game in raw X11 maybe. also if the source code is available, it doesn't compile. I could never play tty quake :P but maybe you can use a 10 year old distro in a VM.

Actually I've had a handset for a year, because VoIP is offered with virtually no added cost. But I had some pioneering offer from the ISP, now more and more widespread, where voice calls to mobile phones are already included in my internet bill (36 EUR per month). So I can call them for free! it even works properly now that I've increased sensibility on the ISP box's web interface. People couldn't fucking hear me before.

The handset is comfortable enough (it's a piece of crap I picked up somewhere), is a useful back up in case of cell phone failure or loss, and I can give the land phone number to people I wouldn't want to have my cell phone number. A win-win-win situation.

In a professionnal or community setting, you can connect an old handset to a computer or a VoIP box, and rent a SIP "line" for one euro per month. or outright buy an IP phone which comes with, you guessed it, a real handset. Everyone in your company gets a desk phone with a real phone number, for a total cost similar to what one land line used to cost. Oh, and in the far future it's probable you could just pick up any handset regardless of who it belongs to and use it with one of your personal identities.

ha, I ententered 20th april 1889 on that birthdate form.

these are CPUs with unlocked multiplier, just as it was before the pentium 2 and Athlon era. only on the expensive models muiltiplier is unlocked though, and other forms of o/c have been severely limited. What does that mean? pretty much only the CPU clock moves, typicaly at default core voltage. No memory and no bus are overclocked : the biggest offenders against data integrity aren't involved in the O/C at all. so it feels pretty safe.

it's sad not to have that great little music playing. the music playback seems improved too.

else this is the first 3D javascript game ever that runs acceptably!, though I have a fast PC (athlon II X2).