I used it earlier this year for writing a library. While it wasn't perfect it was passable. It may have crashed a few times but I never lost my work.

My friend bought the 17 inch model back then and ended up returning it because of that issue. I think it was resolved on those models but I'm not sure. He and I both bought the April model and are enjoying them. The two of us had previously had the original core duo (not core 2) version so the upgrade has been worth it. I recently put in 8 gigs of ram (much cheaper after market) and the thing flies even while running a couple vms. The only things I don't like is that I opted for the 7200 RPM drive which seems to eat the battery. The other thing is that the dumbest programs will kick the nvidia chipset on while on battery causing battery life to dwindle even faster. Why does Evernote need high end rendering?

Just curious, if Ruby is fading what do you see taking its place? My opinion is that it is just coming into its own. YARV and other proper vms are maturing at a rapid rate and Rails 3 seems to be a pretty nice framework. The testability with Cucumber and/or the other types of frameworks is beyond most anything I've seen lately. This is all coming from one who has been exploring Ruby and Rails for the last couple months.

A good compromise is to make sure your sudo setup is good, and disable root logins via ssh completely. You can combine ssh with a utility that will drop in temporary (or permanent) ipchains rules denying IPs or an IP block access to the ssh port after a number of bad password guesses. This way, you won't need your private key if logging on from another host, but still have good resistance against people trying to crack root from remote.

I heard one simple idea that probably would solve the illegal border crossing problem: landmines. Line our side of the border with antipersonnel landmines, everywhere except the legitimate entrances/checkpoints. Post highly visible signs in English and Spanish, and also with graphics in case the person is illiterate, warning that it is a minefield. The purpose of this is to establish a deterrent, not to actually hurt anyone (though if that happens, they can't say they weren't warned). Maybe those signs can include some contact information at the bottom, useful for obtaining information on how to go through the process of coming here legally.

The reason why staph infections can be worse now then in the past is two fold. The first is because hospitals are pushed to be super-clean environments. This first part allows very hardy bacteria to thrive where they normally wouldn't. The second is when antibiotics are given, a lot of people don't take them to the full duration. This second part causes a lot of issues as people are building on top of the chain.

As well the prevelence of anti-bacterial hand washes/wipes/dish soaps/etc are highly damaging to a safe environment. If you goto a hospital or doctors office you won't find antibacterial washes, you'll find microbicide. Let me say this first, thanks a lot flapping heads(I mean sales guys) you're fuckin' us all.

Oh allergies? Yeah. Get yourself outside and eat some dirt. It does a body good.

The train from Wuhan to Guangzhou in China takes 3 hours to cover 1068km (that's scheduled service not a test run). When you want a point to point high speed train it isn't hard to build one. (It replaced a pre-existing line that took 10.5 hours to complete the same route).

Trains can be fast and competitive if you build them right. Most system in the world are a hodgepodge of different systems that have evolved from different systems and standards over the years. As such the top speeds are impressive, but the average speeds suck royally (the route you indicated above Dusseldorf to Vienna is almost completely un-upgraded with a top speed of about 75km\h for most of the route). The only countries with unified, completely upgraded systems to support higher speeds are France and Japan. Everyone else is playing catch up.

Airliners dropping from the sky isn't much of an improvement.

How well does it work under virtualization? I've tried it in the past with various versions of virtual box and didn't have a lot of success. I know part of it was due to vbox not being complete enough but that was because DragonFly was using some older not well supported "chips".

I know they strive for package stability and all but Python 2.4 was released in 2005. Can't we get something newer in there please?

Because it was a novella first in 1979.