Well done.

The fact that Google achieves a 66.66% success rate in acquisitions is amazing. Most M&A's have a success rate of 17%.

According to a quote from the Wharton School of Business:

"Various studies have shown that mergers have failure rates of more than 50 percent. One recent study found that 83 percent of all mergers fail to create value and half actually destroy value. This is an abysmal record. What is particularly amazing is that in polling the boards of the companies involved in those same mergers, over 80 percent of the board members thought their acquisitions had created value.

— Robert W. Holthausen, The Nomura Securities Company Professor, Professor of Accounting and Finance and Management

http://executiveeducation.wharton.upenn.edu/open-enrollment/finance-programs/mergers-acquisitions-program.cfm

I'm not certain that there would be a significant performance increase from such a low-end processor. The VIA C7-D 1.8 only scores 333 on Passmark, which puts it in the range of an early-model Pentium 4 or Athlon XP from circa 2002.

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=VIA+C7-D+1800MHz

It's also a 32-bit processor, so you're going to be capped at 3GB of RAM.

As an alternative, you can easily find used 4-5 year old Core2 Duo systems for $100-$200. They're 64-bit and will score 1300 or higher on Passmark.

http://www.amazon.com/Dell-755-Performance-Intregrated-Professional/dp/B004HPMH9Q/ref=sr_1_4?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1330885080&sr=1-4

I always attributed those to people playing around on VMs or their user agent strings.

But given the "640K RAM should be enough for anyone" mentalities I've seen around here, I'm not certain about that anymore.

As much as some quarters would dismiss today as slacktivism or a cheap stunt, the Internet has needed for a long time now to take the political process seriously.

There is this sort of mythology that has been embraced regarding the idea that technology can route around misapplication of the legal process; that some combination of steganography, encryption and dark fiber will always allow us to enjoy the freedom we've taken for granted on the Internet. But we're on borrowed time. The abuses of copyright law as it currently stands are myriad, whether it's publicly funded research locked down in private journals, or fair use aggregation and citation of news coming under legal attack, or DMCA takedown notices being inappropriately filed, without repercussion, by "content owners" who don't actually have a right to the content they're taking down.

Hide inside TOR if you want to, but the fact of the matter is some truly awful precedent is being set and horrible legislation crafted because only one side reliably shows up to this fight. Take solace in the idea that someone will make you a "free Internet", at least until encryption is illegal over cable and airwaves. Enjoy your privacy until it becomes mandatory to provide ID to browse the web -- commercial interests already examine everything you do and put it in your permanent file. At the end of the day, do not expect technology to provide an answer when the law sets the specifications for the Internet.

I couldn't be happier that the Internet is finally creating a notification and response system for awful legislation. Now it's time to let your representatives know they'll lose your support if they draft, sponsor and pass anti-Internet bills. If they ignore you, vote Rastafarian. Also, consider buying your movies and music used, selling back to the used market, and encouraging your friends to do the same. It's high time to send a fuck you back, because right now everybody thinks we're a joke.

Who said I was male?

The fact that you assumed that, and are still unflinchingly clinging to a 300mhz system from 1997 that is grinding your swap to death, indicates that you might need to get out more.

Very well then, we'll argue about more pocket change.

Discounting shipping, I've seen piles of 4GB drives selling at $4 at Walgreens on clearance, which with tax would be $5.

Either way, USB drives are dirt cheap and have been for years. I'm also a bit wary of the notion that malware will infest a USB drive formatted on ext3 because you were careless enough to use your $5 drive to transfer photos to a pharmacy, instead of reserving another stick for that purpose.

Windows Vista was a hog, but Windows 7 will run on any system that Ubuntu does, and runs well on the same systems, although you may have to disable Aero. The Windows 8 developer preview is actually faster and uses less memory that Windows 7, but it does require a "DirectX 9" graphics card (most anything 2002+), as the graphics are 100% 3D-accelerated.

Win7 also remarkably stable from what I've seen for the past 2 years or so. It's not subject to the junk XP was, like having to run ipconfig /flushdns (or rebooting) to fix network issues. It also uses ASLR and DEP by default for base security purposes.

Because of that, there's no reason to use XP in the Windows world ofr anything except for 1990s-era software that requires IE6 or does things like write to its own C:\Progra~1\ directory. Not to mention XP considers SATA to be exotic hardware, drivers haven't been written for it for years, its PnP driver capabilities are way outdated, etc.

But whatever you're using, it's your choice, and do enjoy. Just thought I'd inform you on this from the other side of things. :)