I've bought many LEDs over the past two years. You can now get good A19 bulbs for $10 to $15 and good br30 for $20 to $25. Things are moving fast in led lighting. In addition to established brands Toshiba and Phillips I've been impressed with bulbs from Kobi and G7. There are too many companies entering the market to count and plenty of junk to avoid (stuff at Lowes), but LEDs are certainly improving quickly.

Chattanooga has fiber through https://www.epbfi.com/ From their website, 50/50 is $57.99, 100/100 is $69.99 up to 1G/1G @ $299.99. I think they they ran fiber on the power poles throughout the city. I don't know how they got around the monopolies, but I'm happy to see that they did. Though they're not cheap, the certainly demolish the incumbents' offerings on the mid to high end. My hope is that neighboring towns will feel the pressure of competition and we'll finally get to where we should have been 10-15 years ago.

ScatterBytes is NOT the backend for MEGA! I'm not sure how I gave that impression. I have however worked BitCoin into the service and to my delight, it has enabled the creation of registration free storage nodes. That means to run a storage node, all you'll need to provide is a BitCoin address to accept payments, and you can just put that in the configuration file. Uploading/Storing data still requires a verified email address because it seems necessary to me for billing. I'd like to support other payment options so I'm all ears.

I haven't released the updated software yet so please be patient. Shortly, I'm going to be publishing a Debian repository for the client and server to make installation and updating easy. I've also got some new (512 MB RAM) Model B Raspberry Pi's in the mail which I'm going to setup as storage nodes. I think they'd make great storage nodes due to their low cost and low power consumption. I welcome any feedback.

-Randall

You make some good points. I value my privacy and others' so I do want to offer payment options that respect privacy. I've done some initial study on bitcoin including trading for currency as that would be essential. I would appreciate any suggestions on implementation using bitcoin.

It is 1.95 cents. That is a cent sign and there is no dollar sign. I will try to make it less confusing.

Disclaimer 1 - This is my system
Disclaimer 2 - The System (ScatterBytes.net) is under heavy development and not currently online. I maybe shouldn't be advertising this on Slashdot, but I would like to get some feedback and if you are interested in adding a storage node or using a client, please respond here or through the website,

https://www.scatterbytes.net/

I currently only want people comfortable with a Linux and a CLI and with the stomach to host data on a system in beta.

You get paid to be a storage node and other than being generally always on, it doesn't matter what type of equipment you use because the system is highly redundant and node outages are expected. Payments are handled through Paypal - both sending and receiving. I'm working on a guide to use a Raspberry Pi as a storage node so that initial costs and power usage will be minimal. The Pi would also double as media/file storage for a local network.

As a client you choose how much redundancy you want. Anywhere from 2 to 20 (or more) mirrors for your data. You can also add parity. After encrypting and splitting a file, the client uploads the pieces to different storage nodes (assigned by a control node), which transfer those pieces to other storage nodes for replication. ALL communication is encrypted and nodes are verified using X.509 certificates signed by a scatterbytes.net CA. Files are encrypted by the client and only the client has the key so ONLY the client can read the data.

Agreed. My ~ $1200 13" Macbook Air has a resolution of 1440x900 (16:10) . I would expect at least the same from any "high end" 13" ultrabook. Otherwise, I'm very interested. I prefer Linux and would pay to have hardware that is WELL supported. The Air is nice, but it has quirks with Linux.

I just donated $20 and am downloading. I really like how you can choose where you want your money to go.

They've taken two approaches to raising funds (donations + shopping integration), while keeping Ubuntu free in the ways most of us care about vs. RedHat, who took a more restrictive route using their trademarks. If you like Ubuntu and are OK with either of these methods of fundraising, I suggest you support them. If they have more funds to make improvements and don't lose their way (queue the Unity comments), Ubuntu could easily surpass Windows and OS X in utility and value for the average user (not just for nerds and grandmas).

I'm not saying it needs to, but how cool would it be for a Free software OS to become the new "industry standard" as Windows has been for the last 15 or so years. I think it takes a leader/company with big resources and a solid plan to make it happen. We'd still have our options as to alternate window managers, etc, but we'd finally be free of working with the black box that is Windows.

According to figure 1 in the study.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1530-9290.2012.00532.x/full#f1

The environmental impact of the battery production is more about other factors than energy used. From the figure freshwater eco-toxicity (FETP), mineral resource depletion (MDP), human toxicity (HTP), and terrestrial acidification (TAP) are the largest impact items from battery production. So maybe a little too much attention is being put on the energy use, which is represented by global warming (GWP) and is a relatively small part of the production "impact".

From the article:

This is the conclusion I came to. Most of the impact is not energy use, but other environmental factors, which can be addressed.

I think this is quite interesting.

http://yarchive.net/comp/linux/drive_caches.html

While I've often gotten the impression that the write cache opens up a large "write hole", Linus says that data is cached only for milliseconds, not held in the cache for several seconds. Still, I'd like to see battery backed caches in regular drives and/or controllers.

Would be nice to hear from some drive firmware writers.

The only real advantage to "Hardware RAID" is the battery backed cache. Hardware RAID comes with the disadvantage of a whole other operating system "firmware" with its own bugs and often proprietary disk layout. Parity calculations are nothing for current CPUs, so the onboard processor is not so useful. Advanced filesystems such as ZFS or BTRFS need direct access to the disks. I'd like to see drives and/or controllers with battery backed cache. Until then, I rely on my UPS.

Yes. It has much lower latency, which is better for real time applications.

I don't believe this is an analog problem as much as a delay problem. Cell phones are the worst. Call someone on a cell phone that you can see. The delay is probably .25-.50 seconds. By contrast, I frequently speak with relatives using direct VOIP (high quality SIP phones) and it's like standing in the room with them. If you have one of the multiple DECT phone sets, call one of the other phones in the set and I'll bet that you find the "digital" voice quality to be quite good.

Wrong. Very wrong. Sports may be over-emphasized, but they are essential and here is why. Although some of us would wish to be all brain and no body, we have bodies that need to be taken care of. Exercise is absolutely essential and sports makes exercise fun. It should be part of the school day because

1. 6-7 hours is way to long to go without physical activity.
2. Teaching physical activity as an integral part of one's lifestyle has lasting effects.

I guarantee there are a large number of readers who's health has suffered (overweight, high blood pressure, etc) because they held the parent's point of view, only to find out 20 years later it was killing them quickly and a change of lifestyle was required. Do your kids a favor by making physical activity an integral part of their day and making it fun. Again, sports makes exercise fun.