Well, I have mod points, but rather than using them, I'll tell my story.

My wife was losing mail and we couldn't track down the problem. I had server logs showing that some mail was accepted by fm, but then disappeared. After much hair pulling, I put in a support request.

I quickly received four pages of logs showing exactly what happened to the mail in question - from the time it was accepted until it was deleted by an email client.

It turns out that there was a Mac Email client which was set to delete mail coming from sources not in my wife's address book. I thought she was only using the webmail. But every once in awhile she'd start the Mac client and it would reach up and expunge mail from the one or two people who were in the fm address book, but not in the Mac Mail address book. Gone without a trace!

Believe me, this kind of service is worth far more than $20 per year.

As you can see from the thread, these guys build on free software, and give back. I run a number of mail servers myself, but I (and my family) use fm because it would take me man years to add on what these guys offer, to say nothing of admining it all.

I'm always amazed that people are willing to waste dozens, maybe hundreds, of hours just to save $20 per year. I keep trying to get my daughter to use fm, but she'd rather struggle with the spam on the free service I provide her on one of my servers than fork out the $20. Wastes my time, too.

I wouldn't say AS is a roach motel of a book. The story is pretty good, and you don't have to buy into her entire philosophy to get some positive take aways from the book (don't mooch off other peoples hard work, work hard yourself, be responsible for yourself, stick to your ideals and don't sell out etc...).

That said, her dialog is lacking at times and she can get quite wordy. Some of the monologues in the book are so extremely long that I wonder if her editor actually edited anything.

I found The Fountainhead to be a much better story though and while it still had dialog issues, she did much less beating you over the head with the long monologues about her personal philosophy.

The TI-89 runs for weeks/months on a set of AAAs, boots quickly, and has a bunch of nice hardware keys that make it perfect for entering math problems.

Yes, it's too expensive. But it's a darn useful device.

What style of music did he play ?

Certified? What's this "certified"?

People should have the right to repair, and have access to the necessary knowledge. Period.

Otherwise, we deepen the already vast split between the people who create and understand our technology, and the people who are merely consumers. Eloi.

We reached some kind of zenith around the middle of the last century - most the the kids who didn't live in the center city knew how to fix their bikes, lawnmowers, tractors, and cars. Some could fix their radios or wire a house. No more. Leave it to the "certified" professionals. After all, you wouldn't want a car on the road which was improperly repaired, it might hurt someone. Slippery slope, guys.

I'm reading this on an eeePC 1000HE that cost me $375. It's no workstation, but who wants to lug one of those around when all you want to do is browse, check email, and do some light development? I've used it during a Python sprint, and it's just fine. A 10 inch 1024x600 is kinda small for development, but it's passable.

I routinely get 8 hours out of the battery, so I rarely plug it in while using it, and generally leave the charger at home. And when I do plug it in during use, the charger is strong enough and the laptop drain small enough that the battery will recharge 100% in 2-3 hours even while using it on a wifi link.