GNOME 3 is the first desktop I've used in a long time that actually tries to do something fundamentally different and better, and, you know what? They've more or less succeeded. I'm glad to see the open source community actually try something different, interesting, and better.

Yes, GNOME 3 is wildly different from the traditional WIMP interface, but once I got used to it, I really think it's the best desktop experience I've had since my NeXTstation days.

The National Orphan Foundation (www.orphan.org) has a named scholarship program. If you donate to the program, 100% of your donation goes directly to the students. You can dictate the requirements for the recipients of the scholarship (four year school, public/private school, major, religion, whatever). Every student in the program aged out of the foster system, meaning that they did not have a family at the time of their eighteenth birthday and therefore don't have a support network.

The original Amiga had a keyboard garage: the machine itself was raise a little off the desk, just enough for the keyboard to slide underneath it.

I loved every single thing about that computer. The Amiga 1200 was fine too. The Amiga 500 was great, but Commodore made their first big design snafu there - they put the Zorro expansion slot on the wrong side of the computer and upside down, so you couldn't use Amiga 1000 peripherals without also flipping them upside down.

(Still not as bad as the "PCMCIA" slot on the A600.)

Other things I miss: TUIs like Project Oberon and Symbolics Lisp. Hell, Lisp in general is now such a niche it's sad. "Real" Unix - lots of little programs that do one thing and do them well. cat -n considered harmful and all that.

Right. And how much money did Airbus save by not having to research everything that they learned by being a contractor on the ISS? How much money did Airbus save by having all of the research NASA has done over the decades be in the public domain?

It's like people saying that SpaceShipOne cost one one-thousandth or whatever of one of the Apollo missions. It's very easy to cost a lot less when 90% of the research has been done for you by NASA and placed in the public domain.

I would love a full-size laptop (13" screen or better) with an ARM chip. Long battery life, full size keyboard and display. It'd be great.

The only things I can find with ARM chips these days are tiny netbooks. The largest I've found is only 10".

Anyone know any "big" ARM laptops?

Now, all that's going to happen is that programmers are going to write their own memcpy-like routines using a quicky for-loop or something. It'll be just as bug prone, and harder to detect via automated source code analysis.