Don't you mean Zilog? ie Z80

I use FeeBSD 8 as a router and also have a Slackware box configured. Both work equally well. My old netgear router only handled 12mb and my cable can hit 35mb/s. Either linux or freebsd or openbsd for that matter make a great router os. If you look around a bit you will find all kinds of howto's on the net. You can also make the box a samba shared drive and a print server if you are up to it. All you have to do is put fwo ethenet cards in medium power system (almost anything with work cpu wise 512m ram will also work fine), install your flavor of linux, enable ipforwarding, iptables, and setup your routing. You will be amazed at the speed increase.

Sounds funny to me. Packet switch due to a database mismatch?

I though AT&T was bad..(well they are). Looks like Verizon is thanking customers as well with very unfriendly customer service. I am a Sprint customer and I can say they finally seem to be getting it. I recently received unlimited cell to cell (any carrier) from them without having to do anything. Looks like T-Mobile also gets it. I see they have added some nice options to their plans. Unfortunately, they (Sprint and Tmobile) are the small guys now.

Most power companies have fiber on the high tension lines and their own network. I expect it (mostly) is not accessible from the internet. My concern is the hardware. A few years ago we had a major blackout because of the domino effect of one or two outages. All of the redundancy works in theory but there is no way to test it in the real world unless you have an outage. It's much like the datacenter outages, they never seem to be as redundant as intended.

This is not surprising. It only indicates that Apple doesn't plan to 1) either use the Atom in a netbook or 2) bringing out a netbook with an Atom in the immediate future. My guess is if they do introduce a netbook it will have a variant of the Atom it can continue to make sure OSX does not work on most netbooks. Apple has a very specific business mode which does not include selling OSX to the masses.

I upgraded an existing install the day of the release. It took a while but that's to be expected. Everything worked great. I would like to see the old gdm configuration editor but no biggie. I then did a clean install on a new driver. It was even smoother. The gdm screen looked better as I had Xbuntu and Kde all on the other system and that seemed to confuse the gdm setup. As I recall. This whining always happens after a new release.

This should be easy to control in fact, the porn sites are full of malware and viruses which endangers the network to say the least.

Slackware is a rock. It is highly configurable, extremely stable, very complete. Especially for a server install. My only concern is it's headed up by only one person. I know Pat has some help but...well what do I care..He is probably 25 years younger than me.

Actually I am using a new imac and getting used to it (from Ubuntu 9.04). I would give Ubuntu the edge in many areas. Gnome, the gui, cut and paste, etc are all better with Ubuntu. Ubuntu is much faster than OSX (I must admit I have a quad core 8mb ram workstation for Ubuntu). Apple has excellent hardware. The display is superb. Access to software is better (MS Office, Photoshop, etc). However, if you don't need the commercial software, then things get real interesting. I booted up the 24" imac with the live Ubuntu amd64 cd and everything worked (sound, airport, nvidia video, etc). I must admit I am really tempted to install Ubuntu on the mac.

Looks like he has been missing for some time. Hopefully he is OK but sounds like he may have decided to take the money and run. The Centos team needs to really find out what's going on here and take control of things. There is a huge base of Centos servers out there. I don't know the usual setup of an opensource organization however, it sounds much like some religious organizations. Some people get caught up in the "message" and just assume everyone is listening and marching to the same drum. It often is not like that.

Sounds very reasonable. Linus is correct. The point of open source is to do something you need done. Sharing it with others gives you satisfaction and reward. What's wrong with that!

I tried it briefly. I had no problems with it. However, I did not see the extreme performance promised and the rumours of data loss were surfacing so I switched back to ext3.

I used to buy most all computer parts from Newegg. Now Microcenter has very competitive prices especially cpu prices and I can return a defective part with no hassle. This has changed my on-line shopping from regular to occasional. We also have Fry's in town however, they are good for mostly sale items.

This is incorrect. The FCC will ask you to allow them to inspect the RF device. You don't have to allow the inspection. There may be additional consequences as a result of your refusal however, most people who are not doing anything wrong will willingly allow the FCC agents to find a source of radio frequency interference.