I tried to request an invitation for my self-hosted address. "That email system is not supported". Thanks. So it's only for people that have more than one account on the above list apparently.

For £300 I got an Atom-based netbook with an 80GB SSD, 4GB RAM, slightly smaller screen and 9 hour battery life. It can run Chrome, and a lot of other things. What's the ARM bringing to the Chromebook, if it can't give far better battery life?

Product placement: Joffrey sipping an ice cold Coke while abusing prostitutes? Cersei sneaking off to use her CVS-branded paternity test kit? They're just not being very imaginative about how they market to pirates.

My blog agrees with you :) I wrote the same thing in response to the Sony PS4 rumours which were just as dire - why aren't they keeping everyone trucking with a simple upgrade of the same machines - lots of RAM, the next generation of whatever graphics chip they bought the first time round. Users get a Xbox360+ or PS3.5, and a set of games with an "enhanced mode" for newer consoles. Developers get to breathe, use the same tools as they're just finished learning, and can put out higher quality titles for less effort. I don't see the down side, or what anyone Sony/MS can gain by throwing it all away again.

Call up Cogent Communications. Ask them where the nearest carrier-neutral data centre is where they could give you a 100Mb transit connection and some simple IPv4 service (some small amount of PA space and a gateway), and how much it would cost you to use it all. That's roughly 25TB traffic, and about the smallest sensible amount of "wholesale" bandwidth you can purchase. Cogent are going to be quite cheap, and you'll be able to use the whole pipe. I'd imagine it'd be in the order of $500-1000 per month, so around 2-4c per gigabyte?

Then call that data centre and ask how for much they could co-locate a cheap 2U box (or if they have a customer who would rent you a small amount of rack space). Ask how much a cable run to Cogent would be.

Add it all up, and that's about as cheap as you can get it, at least starting from scratch. Even if you don't do this yet, you'll know how much other hosting companies are marking up what they sell. For comparison call Level3 for some "quality" bandwidth (you might need to ask for a reseller if you "only" want 100Mb). Or see how you feel about the costs of a second connection, BGP, ARIN membership and all that madness. You'll soon be your own ISP :-)

Important documentary link.

Sure their business will be going away in the next few years, but they don't retailers don't have to help with this deception. If I were Gamestation or GAME, I'd print up some "Resale warning!" stickers, then put them on the relevant boxes on the shelves. You could use amber ones for when the multiplayer isn't transferable, and red ones for single-player content, along with the price of re-purchasing that bit of the game. Print up some posters by the till that explain what the stickers are. That way the game's true value is shown where it should be - stuck on the box along with the purchase price.

btrfs is tanatlizing for VMs because of the copy-on-write file behaviour (i.e. "cp --reflink a b" creates b instantly regardless of the size of a), but http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2011-July/154251.html is still an issue, as far as I'm aware. So storing VMs, where you access them with O_SYNC, just gets slower over time until it's unusable. I'm not quite brave enough to suggest that any of our customers use it, at least until there's a working fsck.

Do you carry rocks in your pockets? :) I have had mine over a year, and apart from not putting it in the same pocket as my keys, I'm not too precious about it. A few scuffs around the outside, but the screen still looks fine.

I understand what sandboxing is. I understand that Mac owners have root/sudo access. I'm not even sure you read what I wrote. I see a business and technical benefit to Apple removing root access, and speculated it will happen in a future OS release, with app installs allowed only from the App Store. It will make Macs more secure, like iOS is, and will make more money for Apple. Why wouldn't they do it?

Back when I joined Slashdot in 98, FUD was the term we used for Microsoft spreading inaccurate gossip about Linux's potential, at a time when Linux was wobblier and harder to support than it is now. Or 15 years before that, IBM trash talking the competition to customers who were thinking of switching their expensive business systems to microcomputer upstarts. Now it's just a lazy ad hominem, to call someone a shill for an unspecified cause. What benefit does a "FUD"der gain from trash talking one OS platform over another? I've got an ISP of my own, my company owns literally thousands of different computers: Macs, Windows and Linux systems. I hate them all equally. Now engage with the argument or get off my lawn.

I think Apple is going to remove root access from the Mac in one or two more OS X updates, and you'll only be able to retain your root access by paying the small annual developer fee. It makes sense to cement their revenue stream from a platform that's still gaining users; the only question is when they can afford to throw the gauntlet down to Microsoft & Adobe.

For a home hub & router, the HP Microserver is pretty good: low-power AMD processor, 4 3.5" drive bays, gigabit ethernet, internal USB header and a very nice, small chassis. They are still selling in the UK for about £120 after cash back (hmm, pricier, $319 from newegg). Maybe that's a bit more than you wanted to spend but you can run a normal Linux distro.

I find it very hard to sleep through http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2P5qbcRAXVk

Though sometimes I panic and hide under a cardboard box instead of opening the laptop.