I agree with pretty much everything you said... But getting rid of ARM? What sort of stupid bullshit is that? The problem has *NOTHING* to do with the architecture and everything to do with Microsoft. Putting it into perspective - there is not a single ARM device that you can buy today that has UEFI... And somehow the problem is ARMs' fault?

I guess perhaps the mindset of the embedded industry who don't think that proprietary blob drivers are a bad thing (hey, nobody but us will ever update the software!) is partly to blame. Yes, most of these companies use ARM, but it still has nothing to do with ARM.

Is probably just the switch to the NT kernel from a stripped (legacy removed) CE kernel. I hope the speed and stability carries through! It's so weird saying that about a Microsoft product but as anybody who has actually used WP7 knows, it's generally rock solid.

Switching to the NT kernel is what has enabled the multicore support and it probably also enables the use of any future x86 hardware platforms too. Obviously moving to NT also helps Microsoft unify their infrastructure because it means they only have 1 kernel to worry about (and mostly just the Metro framework).

Normally I'd be the first one to bash Microsoft about the whole WP8 not being on older devices thing, but since WP8 runs a completely different kernel it'd be foolish to expect them to support older devices which probably don't even have device drivers written for the NT kernel.

Obviously you want an Ultra-book of some type. They're basically the same as the Macbook air (yes, even aluminium unibodies) but you can get them slightly cheaper (especially in the USA). I don't know which one to recommend on basis of Linux compatibility but I'd suspect most would work well. They also (by Intel requirements) use Intel graphics which pretty much always play nice under Linux - and usually the battery life of an ultrabook is great. In 6 months I would bet that there will be $700 ultrabooks as I can currently find $799 ones.

Distribution wise I would be looking at Fedora (and it's complete ecosystem) or Linux Mint (Debian Edition, MATE and Cinnamon are *great* Gnome 2/3 replacements) rather than the tumultuous *buntu distributions.

The Dell XPS 13 ultrabook apparently going to be shipped with Ubuntu as a "developer" option however the reliability of the Dell consumer range is *terrible* and they also seem to have a $999 price tag. Maybe officially refurbished Macbook Airs are an option as they come with warranty for about $800 and maybe there could be a better education discount.

I would also be consulting with teachers about how/what *they* would want to use whatever hardware. Teachers are mostly concerned about *learning outcomes* and if they don't integrate the laptops (or tablets if you go that route) into the syllabus then they just won't get used.

BTW, on the server side of things you may want to check out Resara Server as an Active Directory replacement - this is more your area right :) ?

Is as useful as tits on a bull. Companies can charge whatever they damn well want for their software. Who is anybody to tell them different?

Complaining about the lack of funding into open source or at least home-grown software is much more useful.

I need electrodes for depression like I need several holes drilled in my head.

Mandriva was also selling Mandriva Directory Server - which was a good product IMO. Isn't providing management/services products making them "more than just an OS vendor"?. Novell was doing exactly the same thing with eDirectory/Zenworks.

Kaleidescape servers are really expensive equipment from my experience. Normal consumers are not buying these devices. Kaliedescape servers are only installed in businesses and multi-million dollar houses where generally only legal media is used. It seems to me that they are being manufactured, marketed, sold and (in general) used in a fairly law-abiding spirit. This law suit does nothing but aggravate the situation.

A lot of the tests that were done would have benefited from having Hard Float. Ubuntu ARM port does not have Hard Float. They should have used the Debian HardFloat port to get more accurate performance metrics of what the hardware can do.

I'm not arguing over semantics or fractions of percentages - Hard Float would have given an easy 20% increase in performance for some tests! For example here's an engineer from Genesi showing off the Debain Hard-Float work a few months back... 300% increase in some places?

Would you benchmark cars giving all the others high-octane fuel except one?

Please let it Soft-float fucking die already. It's horrible.

The earth has a widely varying radius.

I'm with ARP too. They're excellent. The offering is good and the service is great. I'm not changing any time soon as I've already tried Linode,VPSLink and a couple of others. A big reason for going with ARP is if you care about IPv6, good network (peers, and good APAC service). You have complete control over your OS as they run KVM virtualisation.

The IRC channel is great too and you can chat with the guys who run the servers and some pretty knowledgeable customers. There's a few names in the IRC you may recognise too. The only downside I can see is that their provisioning process is definitely handled manually instead of a fully automated system that can pop out a new VPS in 30 seconds - so if you're used to that you may be annoyed. It's not that slow, and if you're in the USA you're in the right timezone at least.

I'm running 768 MB, 20 GB, 400 GB USD $20/month and I've been with them about a year and a half.

A site you may want to browse is http://www.lowendbox.com/ as they get some good deals from satisfactory providers.

I'm an IT professional. I'm serious. I've never spent over $1000 on any of my computers. IT pros make more than most musicians... I don't know how the assertion that they should spend more if they're serious makes any sense.
Unless an instrument is completely different (as is likely with an acoustic guitar), the reason most guitarists have multiple guitars is just wankery.

Don't over-analyse this. Yes, there are no patents that make this necessary, there is a hellava lot prior art too. Anybody can make a guitar, and the amount of study required is not that much and all the information is easy to find (I've looked).

I had a look at the guitar, its gorgeous. I'd like to see people play with the style that he has started and make a whole range of open, gorgeous models.

Having an easy base to build off allows the artist to just get-on with the art. Hopefully the frame and the neck can be bought for a reasonable price. Currently you can buy necks fairly easily and of-course you can mod them.

Customer/User satisfaction. If problems are solved in a reasonable way (in terms of time considering your workload, budget and expertise) then that's the only thing management should care about. You're not running a support call center where your job is to read solutions from pre-written scripts - you're solving real problems with real people. There is no script.

Management should be surveying their employees and your reports and work out if more people are needed to do general support. Are you finding time to do project work? If no, then maybe they need to hire somebody to keep users off your back a few hours a day while you do projects.

Please keep all your limbs and appendages inside the quota.

from my cold dead hands.

Though, being fair - I could see a way that it could be implemented while causing the least amount of distress. Also, you may be able to just turn it off, or have it pipe everything out into a nice text based log with FUCKING USEFUL ERROR MESSAGES. I don't run Windows because I can't fix it when it breaks (constantly) mostly due to the fact that you do not get useful error messages like you do in a Unix-like OS.

I could see the proposed system being useful in a large server setup where you care about logging I/O.