I wouldn't call it "useless." I'd go with something more like "a poor trade, exchanging privacy and control for interoperability and ubiquitous access".

To me, the advantage of the cloud is that my inbox looks the same at work (on an XP desktop) as it does at home (linux laptop). Gmail's good like that. I could see the advantage of doing things similarlly for word processing, etc. If I was willing to trade control of my data and privacy and speed for that sort of interoperability and access.

I'm not.

I was just hoping somebody could fill me in on what the summary actually means. there was so much jargon in there I couldn't decipher any of it.

Summary fail.

Have you spent much time w/ Linux recently? There might be a lot niggling problems w/ Linux (particularly wrt proprietary drivers and UI usability), but I'll say this--this OS is born live on the network. X forwarding is a great example--by its very nature, the graphical interface is designed to be usuable over a network. It may or may not be great to use (I can't really comment on that--my main experience with it involves programs running on an over-worked 800MHz server via an overcrowded T1 line) but architecturally, it's built with network in mind.

The majority of the time I spend 'fixing' my wife's computer is hardware/OS agnostic. It's stuff like telling her to plug the printer cable in, making sure her documents are where she thinks they are, etc.

Will spending $1000 really make her looking to see if the printer's plugged in before she tried to print?

I'd love to use Linux for more audio production. But any time I try to do anything besides use Audacity, sound starts to get screwy.

Then I have wade through a mess of acronymns I don't completley understand. OSS? ALSA? JACK? PulseAudio?

Can somebody point me to a newbie's guide to Linux audio? Anything I've ever read (including tfa) is over my head, but I'd like to understand it.

What's the easiest way to try 4.3? Kubuntu-desktop has been a train wreck every time I've installed it on my normal Ubuntu install, and I don't mind downloading a live cd or some such.

Is there a OpenSUSE live cd with 4.3 ready to go out of the gate or some such?

Isn't that part of the reason it's open source? So that you (or somebody you pay) can build a native client for it?

I tend to agree--I don't particularly care to have my email/IM/collaboration software all tied up into my browser (particularly in FF or IE). I want something that does one thing and does it well. But if the protocol is open, as far as I can tell (note: IANAD(eveloper)) there's nothing stopping anybody from building a nice lean, writing-focused Wave client.

Agreed. That (nonsensical) line pretty much ruined the article for me.

Explain to me again how competing for OS and browser share is against Google's interests...because the fact that people use them to look at the internet seems like a pretty poor reason.

Does rsync include actual syncing functionality? Ie. can it tell which version is newer and keep that one on both the server and client?

I've only ever used it to manually transfer files.

Great thread, probably the most thought-provoking/inspiring thing I've ever read on /.

Seriously.

Really, I have yet to see an iPhone game that captured my attention for more than an hour or two

You spelled "Nintendo Wii" wrong in that sentence.

I had a (city) friend on a camping trip basically call me a liar when I told him that white/gray strip of glowing in the middle of the night sky was the Milky Way.

Despite the fact that he couldn't begin to suggest what else it might be.

Poor kids didn't grow up seeing it every night--don't even knwo what it is.

When VMware performance fails, try BSD jails

There's always the pause button. While Hulu video is paused, it gives you a cute little buffer-o-meter, showing you how much progress you've made.

Fwiw, I don't know if a full buffer-o-meter means the whole show's been downloaded or not.

As I promised earlier, if you donate to the site and are unhappy about the rolls, let me know and I will pull a die out of the machine, melt it flat and mail it to you, as an object lesson to the other dice. Tangible revenge.

An object lesson to the other dice. Bahahah.