Silent PC review is a Web site that has been around 2002 which is dedicated to silent or very quiet computing. It's a trove of tips and tricks to make computer less noisy. They also have reviews of various components complete with high quality audio recordings.

I highly recommend it!

http://www.silentpcreview.com/

Even in Canada some corporations are trying to make profit off of scaring people. I see this kind of corporate behaviour even more damaging for society than copyright infringement!

Please lease explain again why we need to go through Microsoft to run the software
we want on the hardware we bought?

I can understand why so many hardware vendors jumped into Microsoft's ploy.
To be able to sell hardware certified for Windows 8, they need to implement
Secure Boot and be able to put a little sicker on their product. However, I
don't trust all hardware vendors to also implement the means for users to add
their own keys or to disable Secure Boot altogether.

Regardless, if Microsoft goal is truly to prevent malware from contaminating
the system's boot process, why do they care about the license of the
bootloader? For me, this clearly demonstrates that Microsoft isn't just doing
this to thwart some malware, but that they have ulterior motives. Making it
more difficult for users to run anything other than the software they sell looks
like a pretty good thing from their business point of view.

Isn't this going against the whole distro idea? Instead of having tree different versions of the same lib, the distro's package manager can actually figure out the components missing for the package you are trying to install. If it the package doesn't exist for your distro, just make one.

The only case where I can see this as useful is to install packages across different distros, but even then, if we adapt this model, we will have incredible bloat in permanent storage *AND* in memory if you run programs that all depend on different version of the same lib.

And I though this new design was all about being able to compute CRCs faster!

On a more serious note :

- It's cool that they recycle the heat and use outside air for cooling during winter (Our winters are way cool enough for that!)

- When the university (also in Québec) where I did my bachelor build a new HPC datacenter in 2005, some students of the engineering faculty actually drafted a project to recycle the heat produced by the datacenter, but they were turned down with the excuse that their project was "too complex". I hope the University enjoys paying for cooling the datacenter and heating the classrooms when it's -20C outside!

I buy all of my games (Which are all PC games). I use the original media to install them, then I store the disks in a safe place where they will not get dirty or scratched.

I fire up a game and get a message : "Please insert disk one of <Insert game name here> into your CD-ROM/DVD-ROM drive." People around me can hear my teeth grinding every single time!

Let's see... If I want to play many different games, I have to keep all the disks handy. Every single time I switch from a game to another, I have to switch disk. Furthermore, I have a lot of data stored on DVD, so every time I want to access it I find some game DVD in my drive.

Do you even wonder why I use No-CD/No-DVD patches? I see it like patching a problem or bug with the game.