i have a pentium 1 laptop (100mhz, 32mb ram i believe) that I was able to run DSL on and NetBSD. I tried installing debian but it ran for 3 days grabbing packages so i finally just killed the install.

How the hell are non-Chinese, for example, every going to figure out how to type a Chinese address?

Visit a dictionary site, lookup the words they need via Pinyin or English, and copy-paste into the URL field. Or, use a Chinese Javascript IME website. Or, write it down somewhere and type it directly via Punycode (probably possible). Or, find the site via Google based on a term they can remember (that's the only time I use "I'm Feeling Lucky", e.g. I search "ascii table" rather than remember if it's asciitable.com, asciitable.org, ascii-table.com, etc.).

People will figure out strategies to make use of these URLs.

The simplest one: write it down. It's not like the spelling of Hudong or Zhongguo is obvious when you have only heard it.

I do work for Vestas in the UK, you are exactly right. Blade building is currently very labour intensive, I've actually worked on the shop floor for a week. There were protests at the Vestas factory on the Isle of Wight when it was closed down, even though it clearly didn't make economic sense to builds the blades in the UK with high labour costs while almost all the blades (for V82 1.6MW turbines) are sold to the USA and China. So Vestas decided to build new factories in the US and China instead.

The bigger question is, why is Vestas, a Danish Company, the biggest wind turbine producer in the world with ~25-30% market share? How come countries like the USA, Germany who gave billions to Boeing, Siemens, GE and the like for wind turbine research and had nothing to show for it, and everyone ended up using the iconic three bladed "Danish" design?

The answer boils down to having smart people in the government, avoiding overly ambitious expensive projects that often ended in failure, having a long turn vision in providing continued support in good times and bad times.

Having written an AHCI driver and worked endlessly on USB driver code there's no real point comparing the two. SATA is far, far, FAR more reliable. End of discussion. The USB chipset specs are horrid and the chipset implementations are even worse. Most chipsets barely pass through standard I/O operations properly and rarely deal with things like disk synchronization or even proper serial number reporting (for the USB bridge chips). USB has far higher cpu processing overheads and the DMA specs or so bad the driver often has to create bounce buffers. Command queueing overhead for a USB chipset is ridiculously huge compared to SATA chipsets.

USB is fine for a portable drive but only a complete fool uses USB if they need reliable mass storage.

E-SATA has its issues but they are nothing compared to the mess you get when you connect a drive up through USB. Frankly the only time one hits the 300 MByte/sec limit with today's SATA/E-SATA in a way that actually negatively impacts a production system is when one is talking to multiple targets over a port multiplier, on a single SATA port. The real need for 6GBit E-SATA is to better support port multipliers and not so much for SSDs.

While it is true that an SSD can hit the current 300 MByte/sec limit over SATA, there aren't really any realistic production loads against single drives (verses port multipliers) where an improvement in the bandwidth would actually improve the machine's ability to handle its workload.

-Matt

Try taking a look at the products offered by MaxVision. They have products that fit all of your requirements except one - cheap. As others have previously pointed out, what you're asking for is definitely not cheap, but I wouldn't consider it outrageously expensive. Their web site makes it a bit of a pain in the ass to get prices (registration and email required), but I think you could probably find what you're looking for around $10-20K.

But, if you're willing to spend a little more money, I'd definitely take a look at some of the MaxPacs. We've used them in the past and have had very good experiences. They're rugged, portable, and include LCD monitors. I think they sell a lot to the Army for use in Iraq, which doesn't have the best operating conditions either.

Isnt it Toronto's license place saying "yours to discover" or something like that?

as someone who has used samba, he is responsible for one of the worst configuration file formats ever

Let's see your alternative to it, then. Show us all a better way.

Let's say you're a general on a battlefield. Two of the army's top weapons engineers come to you with their artillery designs.

The first one says, "General, we've designed a new gun! It's better than the ones before it, and best of all, it only misfires-- thus killing the gunner-- one out of every 100 shots!"

The second engineer says, "General, our new gun is even better! It only misfires-- thus killing the gunner-- one out of every 1000 shots!"

The first engineer retorts, "But your gun misfires too!"

Honestly, now, which gun do you pick? We can differentiate based on severity, no? Or are they the same because they're both, technically, flawed?

You have to pick a web browser. Wouldn't it be better to pick one with fewer defects?

This might be a bug with nVidia's drivers more than anything. I experienced similar problems with the default drivers in intrepid, but the issue is fixed for me in jaunty. See this bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/269904

Of course, this assumes you're using the defective drivers in the first place...

I used to buy the recycled brown toilet paper and tell my housemates that it was recycled *from* toilet paper, thus pretty much ensuring that they wouldn't use it at all (girls, I can assure you, use vastly more T.P. than men). They were pretty much horrified of the stuff. Now T.P. actually made from poo... I love it!

From the image how would you differentiate the systems running Linux or Mac OS X?

Why don't you actually do some reading. There is more and more evidence that homosexuality is, in fact, genetically based. The AMA, the APA, and the APS published a joint paper many years ago (1999) asserting that homosexuality is a normal variant in human sexual behavior. Do you have the evidence to refute them? Didn't think so.

Having tried many HMD in my previous job, I was very surprised to try the latest one which are light and finally usable. My money is on this.

I feel it saddening, however, that no game technology focus on the gameplay. Devices, better resolution, better graphic quality, but the games are still the same as Quake I (and less fun than Duke Nukem 3D)