Excellent idea! I'd love to see Facebook start charging so I could use that excuse to skip lame parties!

I also use a Mac mini on my HDTV — 2ghz Core 2 Duo with 4gb RAM. I have yet to encounter any media that it can't play perfectly fine. And it's silent for all intents and purposes, which makes it ideal as an always-on appliance.

To be the devil's advocate, there are lots of browsers that share rendering engines, but that doesn't mean they don't count. Also on that list are Safari and Chrome (both using WebKit) as well as Firefox, K-meleon and Flock (all using Gecko.)

This once was true but not anymore. The current Mac version of Google Chrome does indeed support extensions and has the bookmark manager.

I've been on Linode for a bit more than five years and have been very happy with it. Very rarely have I needed to contact customer support, but when I did they were responsive and got the incident resolved and closed very quickly.

As others have indicated you do have to spend some time settings things up the way you want because you basically start out with a new unconfigured Linux distro. But I like that because you get most of the same flexibility you'd want out of self-hosting or colocating, but without having to deal with hardware, connectivity, etc.

If you are not already comfortable editing server config files yourself (or at the very least installing stuff with apt and configuring using Webmin) you should go with a simpler service like Dreamhost. But if that prospect doesn't scare you, I really couldn't be any more positive about Linode. It's a great service.

People with older PowerPC hardware may feel stuck between a rock and a hard place, yes. But there are a couple free/cheap solutions for those running Intel Macs:
- Use Safari: The current version (4.0.4 at the moment) is available for 10.4. Granted the next major version may or may not, but we'll have to cross that bridge when we come to it.
- Get Snow Leopard for only $29 and run any version of Firefox you want.

I'd look for one posted on Craigslist, or even post a "wanted" ad of your own. That way before you buy you can see the media firsthand and verify it's a factory disc and not a burned copy. Just make sure you get a regular retail copy -- ie. not the gray restore disc that came with a specific Mac. Those typically refuse to install on anything but the model it came with.

That was exactly my thought with the original post. Unless you're a hardcore gamer (really most of the general population isn't) or your'e running a server (which probably violates your terms of service for your home DSL/cable connection anyway) you'd never even know the difference.

It's just an academic question at this point, but why are all these new addresses neeeded?

Yes, I know NAT isn't a real solution for a shortage of addresses. But really, the vast majority of Internet-connected devices don't need a public address.

Home Internet connections, cell phones, etc. have no need for public addresses. Which begs the question, are these companies just being selfish in requesting so many more? I don't see any real legitimate need. And if this is the case, why are they still actually being given more?

This is partially true, but it's not as if the sophistication of native apps will stop either. Web apps are behind now, and I think they will remain behind in the future, because they're not native code making full use of native APIs.

There are already plenty of web-based apps that will run fine on any mobile device that uses a WebKit-based browser –meaning iPhone, iPod touch, Android, Palm's WebOS, and more. Examples range from a Twitter client called Hahlo, to Google Reader. This is nothing new and nothing exciting.

I like Mozilla and their products, but web apps on mobile are the same old story as web apps on the desktop. Native apps will always be better, and any advantages that web apps may have had are easily compensated by making your native app able to sync its data to online services.

It's painful how badly the original article frames the relationship between Firefox, Thunderbird and SeaMonkey. Here are a few basic facts about Firefox/Thunderbird/Mozilla, though not necessarily in exact chronological order...

- Netscape started Mozilla as an open source foundation on which future versions of Netscape would be based.
- The all-in-one browser suite was called Mozilla, and the rendering engine therein is Gecko.
- The Mozilla suite was the basis of Netscape 6 and 7.
- A browser-only version (Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox) was created.
- A mail/news-only version was also spun off as Thunderbird.
- Eventually Netscape 8 and 9 were also released, but based on Firefox rather than the suite.
- Thanks to the growing popularity of the standalone apps, the Mozilla suite was turned into an unsupported (by the organization/corporation, anyway) community project, and renamed to SeaMonkey to avoid confusion over who was developing it.

The main point to take away from this is Firefox and Thunderbird are based on SeaMonkey, not the other way around. A lot of code from Firefox and Thunderbird comes back to SeaMonkey, however, which is frequently a source of confusion for users.

For many people webmail is king, but real desktop email clients still have a lot to offer. Even if I primarily used a webmail interface (which I don't), I would still want a desktop email app around for its ability to easily interact with other desktop applications -- for example handling attachments generated by your other apps to hand off to your mail client. Or even just the "Send Link" or equivalent menu item in your web browser to quickly email someone the address of the page you're viewing. Webmail has matured a lot in the last few years, but it lacks a certain level of polish that won't be possible until web apps become true peers of desktop software.

Great advice. It's also important to make sure you do it in an environment that you like. I got into tech/IT jobs because computers were my hobby, not my actual field of study in college. But I quickly hated each job I got. Either I felt exploited and unappreciated, or I hated an aspect of my job such as too much time spent doing phone support.

About a year and a half ago I found a job doing IT for a couple technology-heavy K-8 schools. For once I actually enjoy my job -- or at least don't hate getting up in the morning -- because I feel valued and appreciated by the staff and students. And even if I put in unpaid overtime once in a while, at least it feels like it's for a good cause.

So once you've decided what you enjoy doing, you really need to find a tolerable place to do it. Your coworkers and overall work environment can turn an "I like doing this" job into something you hate overnight.