Yeah, but who is gonna support it? One of the nice part about these devices is that they are pretty much immune to malware, and from a software standpoint are nearly unbreakable. You give one to your mom and never do tech support again. Windows is find if you have the time, urge, and know-how to maintain it (or the cash to pay someone you trust to do it for you), but is completely inappropriate for the vast clueless masses. Surely you aren't arguing that Windows 8 is the future of computing on the low end?

My oldest has a class where the teacher provides Chromebooks. The school district already provides Google email for the kids, so it is a good fit. She claims it works just fine for what she does, and wants one at home to replace here old Dell laptop. I'm just hoping the new Haswell models to come out in time for X-Mas.

If you love your job, you are the 1%. Most people dread going to work. A 10% bump in pay is not going to change that for the vast majority of them. Money is just money, happiness is a state of being. Not long ago, I was offered a 50% raise to leave my senior position at a small company to go work for a much larger one. Negotiations went well until the very end. In the "afterhour" when it was apparent the job was mine, I happened to ask about the desktop. Being a senior employee at a small company, I am accustomed to having vast flexibility. The norm is two desktops, one Linux and another Windows for testing, with a trio of monitors, plus a Mac laptop so all the major platforms can be tested. I was informed they run Windows XP, IT evaluates ALL hardware requests, and that is that. It was then I realized that trading guru status in a small company for being just another random coder at a large corporation would require a huge revision of expectations. In the end my family helped me decide that time with them (work at home now), happiness with my day to day computing experience, and overall flexibility was worth more then a 25% raise after taxes and commuting expenses.

Your situation is yours however, good luck, and I hope it works out well for you.

Or at least it does in PHP 5.2, but in 5.3, not so much. There have been many of these little idiosyncrasies over the years, enough that my company moved our core product to Java long ago. Stupid stuff like that makes it impossible to upgrade the PHP version without major QA and developer time to address all the new "fixes" the PHP folks decided to introduce in the latest minor release. Meanwhile, my C and Java code from 2001 still runs just fine. That said, when I am coding something for fun, not for profit, I usually end up with PHP on the server side. PHP is coded by amateurs for amateurs. Keep it far and away from any critical systems and it can actually be kinda fun.

Cool, I do not need to remember what 2+2 is anymore, now I can just Google it!

@Bonch: Congratulations, you are officially the Grinchy douche on Christmas.

OP: Great questions, I can not wait to see answers. Would love to hear more about what your software solution is for encoding, I've got a bunch of DVDs & Bluerays I would really like to get on the network, but a streamlined rip+encode+publish I have yet to achieve :-/ What are you using on the frontend? I've got various iDevices roaming about, and a Roku that does 720p for the projector, but haven't had much luck with mt-daapd so far.

I do not trust wireless for my projection room, I ran cat 6 everywhere when I moved in as nothing beats the reliability of copper. I've got a basement, so I put the server is right by the patch panel in the furnace room. Noise is definitely an issue. The only thing that scares me about the garage is bugs and what not gumming up the cooling enough to cause catastrophic failure. With a bunch of drives you need a bunch of airflow to keep everything cool, I can just imagine the intake fan sucking up mosquitoes, and coating the CPU cooling block with my dog's blood.

As far as rack vs tower, I started with a rack and ended up with towers. The rack systems just took up way too much floor space, and that space was poorly utilized to boot. It made a very large utility room feel much smaller.

Dirty hippies all over the world vow to not bath again until travesty corrected. How is this newsworthy? Business stay in business by making money, Canonical must start sometime.

You are mostly correct, abandoned works should be in the public domain after a reasonable period. I do not doubt that project G is in violation of the letter of the law, but is it really in violation of the spirit of the law?

I was in London last year and took quite a few photos with an DSLR. Hell, I even got a bobby to pose for me.

There is little time left. Fortunately it is August and those in North America have the beach. For many, there is something surreal about watching a sunset over the water. It is an experience that crosses many personal divides. Spend what time you have left smiling my friend, you will thank yourself later.

Yes, the copyright laws need to change, I admit it. They need to change back much closer to what they were originally, about seven years. That would give artists time enough to make a living off their inventions. The perverse indefinite extension of copyright has enabled the masses to rationalize their actions. They are right, as are you. The artists must concede that they are not the new nobility, due to be rich for the actions of their grandparents. Resistance is of course futile.

I agree, Flash has been trash from the get go. The sooner it dies, the better off we all are.

HTML5 FTW

yes we are.

no we're not.

no we're not.

no we're not.

cheers from europe.

Guns are scary, especially those evil 'semi-auto' ones.

Cars aren't guns so they aren't scary and cars totally aren't multi-ton murder machines.

Blowing it up in the area of geo-stationary orbit would be the most stupid thing to do.
"Have a nice new dark-age!"

We need a crash course:
make a probe with arms and an engine to get sent up, grab onto it, and take it down into the drink.

Yeah, harvesting this stuff would be better, but that ain't gonna happen.
Sure, you could have it bring dead sats to a landing vehicle to do reclamation,
but old owners who had written them off as dead would bitch for their bit,
and add in astro-preservationists... "it's a bit of space history, it HAS to stay up there".
(OK, for some early sats, fine; most of what's gone up in the last 30-40 years, probably not).