Since you can now get 2TB drives you should be able to fit 90TB in one of these boxes :)

And I thought I was doing well with a few terabytes in my home server (but hey, ZFS should save me from silent data corruption when the drives inevitably start to fail).

That is the sort of English up with which I will not put!

I'll throw in another vote for the Nexys2. It's brilliant value, and you can program it via USB! Don't underestimate the value of that. The USB programming cable for the ML501 board I'm working with at the moment costs more than the Nexys2 board.

The toolchain is free-as-in-beer, but I've only run it on Windows. I think there is a linux version of ISE, but I don't know about the diligent programming software.

Microsoft still needs to pull their finger out. OS X gets 20-25% longer battery life on the same hardware as Windows Vista or 7: http://anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=3582

You say "by default" - do you know how to turn this off? This is one "security" feature that really bugs me - on windows and on OS X. Yes, I really want to run that executable that I downloaded. That's why I downloaded it! I think I'm smart enough not to run some random executable that suddenly appeared on my desktop/in my downloads folder.

I'm pretty sure he's referring to the GSM version, and hopefully there'll be navigation software for other countries. Even without the navigation, it's an iPhone with a real keyboard and you don't need iTunes to get music onto it - I'm sold!

I'll have Verilog's ability to own my own gun and point it wherever I like over VHDL's lead shoes (so you can't shoot yourself in the foot) any day.

VHDL isn't "comparable to" Ada, it's based on Ada - which was designed to be hard to code in. While that link is a joke, it hits pretty close to home (kinda like that "C++ was invented to keep programmers employed" interview, but more believable IMHO).

I guess Verilog really is C-like in the sense that both languages' type systems don't shy away from the fact that underneath it all bits are just bits, while VHDL/Ada do everything possible to deny it.

OMFG, this annoys the hell out of me. VHDL makes it far too hard to treat numbers as bit-vectors and visa-versa. That and the two incompatible ways of doing maths make Verilog the better choice unless you're forced to use VHDL, IMHO.

The operators are the same as C operators, the comment style is the same and there are semicolons. That is the full extent of the similarity with C. The are no braces (well, there are, but they don't mean what they do in C), macros are different, constants are different, assignment can be different, functions aren't functions, switch statements are case statements, etc, etc... saying that Verilog is "C like" is only going to confuse people who know C. Verilog has more in common with VHDL that with C really (begin and end statements, two difference types of variables, two different ways of doing assignment, both languages have constructs with no C equivalent) and yet people only say Verilog is "C like".

Ok, I'll bite - what does VHDL give you control over that Verilog doesn't?

I use that key still... how do you take screenshots?

And Alt+SysReq+{R,E,I,S,U,B} can safely reboot a locked-up linux system if the "Magic SysReq Key" kernel option is enabled.

That goes the wrong way; I was to avoid having to use iTunes to get music onto the phone.

I was about to post something very similar - why would anyone bother with a 555 these days when you can get an ATtiny for under a dollar?

Come on, openMoko sucks pretty hard and no SoC project is going to fix that. And if it somehow did stop sucking it would then be a competitor to Android - so why would Google fund it?