One thing to note, though, is that Linode will sometimes hand out extras - and if it's disk space or RAM, you'll need to reboot to take advantage of it. :)

I've been a happy customer since 2003 - Linode was literally a day old (at least for public availability) when I first got a VPS from them. Over the years, CPU, RAM, disk capacity, and data transfer have steadily increased, for no extra charge, and the service has been rock-solid.

I had an '82 RX-7 about 20 years ago (damn, that long ago?!). On the plus side, it was damn fun to drive, the engine was silky smooth, and the car had beautiful styling. On the minus side, the E-Z-Flood manual choke was very touchy in cold weather, spark plugs and other mundane parts were ridiculously expensive, and it was expensive to insure.

The crowning irony: my 2010 Honda Fit has noticeably faster 0-60 and slightly faster quarter-mile times, outcorners the RX-7, and gets about 75% better fuel economy, and is cheaper to insure and seats four to boot. Both the Fit and the RX-7 had 5-speed manual transmissions; the Fit isn't so peppy with a slushbox.

In recent months, I've noticed that Google Maps satellite view has been pretty hideous in Firefox. Satellite view tiles get updated on a haphazard basis with long delays, and that wasn't the case beforehand. It's just as much a problem on fast machines as it is on slow ones. Recently, I decided to fire up Chrome, and, lo and behold, the satellite views work quite nicely.

It makes me wonder whether it's Firefox's fault, or if Google Maps has been tweaked to work better in Chrome, or perhaps both.

Are you sure there isn't something else wrong (perhaps a resource-hogging antivirus package, or a badly-fragmented hard drive)? I know this is just another anecdote, but I'm writing this from a system that's about identical to your low-end box (1.8 GHz Sempron and 1.5 GB RAM, onboard NVidia 6100, XP Home SP3), and FF 6.0.2 is quite peppy and responsive. A new blank tab comes up instantly, and a new tab with a page doesn't take any longer to load than if I didn't open the tab. Granted, I don't keep 100 tabs open, but I often have 8-10 up. As for extensions, I have NoScript, PrefBar, and DownThemAll installed. At the moment, I have Thunderbird, GVim, PuTTY, OpenVPN, TigerVNC, and Oracle SQL Developer up and running (and SQL Developer, written in Java, is by nature a memory pig).

NoScript, above all else, is the reason I run Firefox. I don't even bother with AdBlockPlus, since static ads don't really bother me, and NoScript does a fine job of scrubbing out the annoyances.

If you have an old-school spinning-disc watthour meter that doesn't provide a direct wattage readout, you can use the disc and a stopwatch to measure your power draw. Note the value marked "Kh" on the meter, and measure the time it takes for the disc to make one revolution. You can then calculate the watts:

W = Kh / (t / 3600)

Of course, power demand may change while you're timing the disc. Also, you need a stopwatch with at least 1/5-second resolution; small differences in time can be significant.

I couldn't have said it better myself, although I haven't had a problem with drivers breaking. Still, it seriously pissed me off when they started screwing with my window buttons, and don't get me started on Unity - or GNOME 3 for that matter. Focus-follows-mouse, HELLO?! Where did you go?!!

I'm still wondering where I'll go once 10.04 LTS dries up. I'd go back to CentOS, but they've had real trouble keeping up with upstream releases over the last year. At that point, Scientific Linux may be my choice.

Or flushed it down a toilet.

Maybe because I wanted to get one that didn't cost more per month than my home internet connection, and wasn't saddled with misfeatures designed to con the victims, er, customers into spending even more? I'd love to be able to jump on the Internet wherever I go, whenever I want, but not if it's going to to be a neverending ripoff. Maybe you like bending over for the likes of Verizon and AT&T, but don't assume everyone else does.

As it is, the shortest book ever written is "Cell Phone Companies that Don't Suck."

...and thanks for all the first posts!

It's been a great run - I hope your next endeavor hits it big.