It's an old version of the OS, it does not have the android market (unless the user puts the hacked version onto the device), early versions lacked full 3D games support, and from what I recall it had no accelerometer.

Also, every time I see one in the store, it's sitting there crashed, requiring a forced-reset.

IOW, it's typical of an Archos product, and therefore didn't make a splash.

I just looked at that img on my N1, and it looks nothing like their screenshot of it.

It's CouchDB. It's that thing that tries to suck all the contacts and personal information off your computer if you're running Ubuntu, and store it with Canonical.

I think you have misunderstood exactly what CouchDB is. Its just a document db.

Yeah, Virtualbox is NOT paravirtualization.

Which OS has that requirement?

Why would you want really long term support when you have no less than a year window for a free and quite easy upgrade?

The "quite easy upgrade" is often not quite as easy as you make it out to be. Why bother to do that on a box which 100% works already (and still has security patches available for years)?

> Is this it? Why is this a function of the distributed nature of the RCS?

It's not. But essentially all DVCSes have decent (to great) merge tracking, which makes this possible. It could be done with a centralized system too.

The other big benefit is pure speed. Try switching branches on a DVCS local repo a few times, and you'll realize very quickly what a difference this can make.

Exactly... dvcs doesn't stop you from pushing into a branch on the "server" periodically. In fact, it encourages it.

I'm much more likely to keep stuff out of CVS/SVN for much longer periods of time, because the branching process is so much more time consuming.

If you want to see a really fast (and consequently dumb) JIT compiler, look at .NET. That thing always JIT-compiles because it doesn't have a bytecode interpreter at all, so it had to be made really fast.

I don't know about the claim that the JIT compiles everything... but I do know that it does have an interpretter. Its quite possible to run the .Net CLR in pure interpretted mode.

Chrome is nice but Windows only, there's now (finally!) a Linux version, but it's so buggy that it often crashes X windows.

"If an X server crashes, its a bug in the X server"

The real question for any particular site is Silverlight Installed base + conversion rate; if they can get 80% of users who don't have Silverlight to isntall it, from a base of 30%, then they get 86% of their users with Silverlight.

And there's the real problem. Yes, they could get ~80% with enough work. Or they could just use Flash, do almost no work to convince customers, and settle for a mere 95+%. :)

'm quite pleased with the current rate of adoption, myself.

In looking over the stats on a fairly high traffic consumer heavy site:
Flash (9+ only): 97%
Java (1.5+): 87%
Silverlight (all versions): 20%
Silverlight (2+): 19%

Why would you use Ubuntu Server? Why not just use Debian?

Because Debian drops security updates for old versions after about 3 years (variable). LTS Ubuntu server releases are supported for 5 years, every time.

If you have 4GB (and you don't have some other bottleneck, like a dirt-old processor) you should have zero problems running any version of Visual Studio.

Thats true.

But get used to Eclipse on the same machine and it'll still seem extremely slow.

Even if you're not going this far.... the business school at Wake Forest University a few years ago suddenly became a lot more selective and shrunk the number of people it would accept.

I was once bumped from an elective for being 2 credits short of a requirement. I was told by the dean that there was no way around it. I never had another chance to take the course.

It was good for their certification compliance, but bad for me as a student (and, really, it was bad for the school as well). I came to hate these types of shenanigans.