Yeah, I'd agree there's plenty of room for both at home, work, or any fixed-connection setting, but for mobile use I'll take downloaded-and-stored over streamed-and-cached any day of the week.

With a cache of a spotify stream, for instance, will it be possible to tell how much music you have cached up in reserve? What happens when the next hour+ leg of your journey is through the countryside with bairly a 2g GSM signal, let alone a 3G signal, and your backup cache runs out?
Sod that. Plus, that's not even considering the total inefficiency of streaming the same content over and over again, why not just download it once?

To answer the article's question: I can't see myself streaming music to my portable player anytime soon. Capacity is high enough to be plenty for a trip of pretty much any length, storage is cheap, and mobile internet access is patchy at best. Whilst on the move, I'll take my locally stored, decent bit-rate, painstakingly tagged audio, cheers.

Stream to find.
Once found, buy, download, store, archive. Then use as you wish. (You could even do it in that order, if you were so inclined)

If I had to guess, I'd say his computer is about 5 or maybe 6 years old. Up until 3 weeks ago, I was still running a 2.8Ghz P4, happily sat in a trusty ol' i875 board. I bought that chip in 2004.

Throw gigabytes of ram and a modern graphics card into a computer, and suddenly it becomes apparent that the processor is really not the bottleneck.

I did my whole CS degree on that rig, and not once did I ever think; 'shit, you know what I need, another core...' .

The money I wouldve had to spend on a new CPU-MB-RAM-GFX combo, I used to buy more monitors instead.

Funny you should mention that. Whilst watching T2 the other day with some friends, we were taking a little trip on the Time-Travel-Paradox line, and came up with this little nugget:

If in the original film, the 1st Terminator sent back had indeed completed it's mission and killed Sarah Connor, then that would have ensured Skynet never gets/will be created.

• Sarah Connor dies before crushing metal motherfucker #1.
• Chip never gets found.
• Cyberdyne in 1991 never get to perform their research.
• Skynet doesn't get developed.
• Obviously wont become Self-Aware, as it doesn't exist.
• Judgement day doesnt occur.
• Everyone lives happily ever after.
• Profit?

Okay, first things first:
        We did vote GB in, If you read up on UK election law, youâ(TM)ll more than likely find that you vote for the party, and the party chooses its leader, who becomes prime minister. Basically, you vote for the party you want to represent you, and they choose from their ranks someone to do just that. And since labour was voted in, we get a labour prime minister for the duration of the term.

Secondly, the alternative at the moment is infinitely worse, in the shape of a vapid, bandwagon jumping Eatonian and his gang of old boy chronies. I have absolutely no doubts whatsoever that given the chance, the conservatives would be pulling this bullshit only on a larger scale. And if you disagree, please read into their treatment of dissenting voices during the 80â(TM)s, i.e. strikers/protesters. Not to mention the fact that these muppets have not a single coherent policy to say for themselves.

Change for changes sake is not necessarily a good thing. Iâ(TM)m as fucked off as the next guy with the string of BS coming out of downing street at the moment. The list is seemingly never ending, involving data security, the fucking hilarious âdigital Britain reportâ(TM), the constant CCTV camera coverage, and ridiculous policy after ridiculous policy, but Iâ(TM)m also certain that things would get a lot worse under conservative government. Privatisation of things that shouldnâ(TM)t be privatised (read NHS), taxation policies designed to keep rich people rich, and loose regulation for companies are all things this country really doesnâ(TM)t need, and would be instigated in a heartbeat.

Basically, iâ(TM)m fairly certain weâ(TM)re fucked either way, and iâ(TM)m moving to Scandinavia...

I'd be willing to bet this article is a joke. Taco, kdawson, timothy and the rest of them had a bet, to see if we'd actually read and discuss the article.

Now they're all sitting around, smoking cigars and belly laughing, contemplating when the circle jerk is going to begin. 'Cos it turns out they win, and we lose.

Shit, I'm embarrased I even clicked on the article. 200 Comments? Christ, we should collectively have a word with ourselves, cos this is ridiculous.

This isn't a story, it's not news, it fuckin retarded, end of...

We could also do with the big distro vendors getting on to device and peripheral manufacturers about drivers.

I've tried to switch a number of times in that last 2 to 3 years, whilst i still have the time and inclination to learn, but each time i've had to return to windows pretty much full time, and run linux in a nice tidy little virtual box VM, beacuse half (almost literally) the stuff I (and many others) use with my computer just doesnt function. Dont get me wrong, if i only wanted to web browse, edit, listen to music and watch video, then it would almost certainly have replaced windows on my machines, but thats not all people do on their computers...

I'm not talking about exotic, out-of-this-world-mega-hardware, i just mean things like mobile phones, any mouse purchased post 2004 with more than 3 buttons, TV cards, sound cards, printers, and dual head graphics. The state of affairs is still such that I (yes, I know it may be different for others...) cant sync tasks or transfer music to my phone, print a map or watch TV using my hardware. Nevermind getting things to output on 2 monitors, which was just a whole host of unpleasentness. All of which makes switching impossible, for me and I'm sure many others.

Sure, you can try one of the myriad work arounds and fixes on forums, but they rarely if ever work properly. So, whilst the software is important, I'm convinced that it's availability of native drivers for common consumer hardware that is more important than the current version of photoshop...

Until linux drivers are as common as mac drivers, i.e. available in the box, or alongside the other 2 on the drivers download page, people just wont be confident enough to switch. Or at least people like me. And im a feckin CS student for christ sake. Sadly, claims that your hardware will 'just work' are way, way off...

Hate (well, enjoy..) to be a pedant my friend, but Berners Lee invented the web, not the internet.