It is funny you bring up Henry Ford.
My boss always says, "If Ford asked the customers what they wanted, they'd say they wanted a better horse."

I agree with this philosophy in that there is a CHOICE. I CHOOSE not to buy/partake/drink the Apple koolaid because I don't like their offerings. I hear HP has a Tablet coming out that will run Windows 7... I'll bet that isn't locked into some kind of "artificial limitation".
Something that is unnecessary has never stopped people from doing it.

I don't know about "experts" but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night...

Seconded.
500MHz AMD Geode (NAS Reference Design)
512MB RAM
1x Gigabit Ethernet
4x SATA Ports
1x IDE + 1x CF. (OS runs from a 4GB CF, Gentoo tuned)
2x 320GB Laptop HDs in mdadm RAID 1 (mirror)

I have the drives spun down after 30 mins of idle and under full load (samba transfers via SSH tunnel), the system barely tops 13W. It idles between 5 and 8W nominal.


My previous (but still in operation) Linux server was a modded Xbox running Gentoo and also two 320GB HDs. Average power usage there is around 35W.

Is it now... And here I thought it was that lump three feet above your @$$... (/me is booted from the game)

Amazing. Kent State is brought up as an example of trying to compare protests in Iran to previous protests in the US? There isn't enough information coming out of Iran to confirm or deny the type of protests going on but by all accounts it sounds peaceful on the side of protesters and open violence on the side of the government. Kent State, by the time the fourth day of protesting rolled around, those students were far from peaceful and while this doesn't excuse the tragedy of killing and maiming said students, it does seriously call into question the comparison here.

There are plenty of other peaceful protests that come to mind that would make much better comparisons. Many of the Civil Rights marches come to mind.



--
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.

I had to talk a cousin of mine through the removal over the phone. I couldn't remote control his PC because the ISP was baller blocking.

I didn't need to use any fancy progams to get it to quit running, but I did use Spybot and AVG to remove it after it stopped running at startup.

Steps:
1) Killed all suspicious processes using Processor Explorer/Task Manager. Researched ones I wasn't sure of.
2) Disabled System Restore. (Critical)
3) Removed all traces and suspicious programs from the "run" sections in the Registry. (Do a search for "run" using only 'keys' and 'match whole string' checked.)
4) Searched the drive for the executable files found in the registry and renamed them to something rude.
5) Pulled the plug from the machine. Upon restart, it wasn't running and AVG was able to move it to it's vault. Spybot took care of the rest.

Roughly translated:
"Passersby were amazed by the unusually large amounts of blood."
:p

XBMC would only start showing age if folks bought into this HD malarkey. For those happily sticking with their standard definition TVs, XMBC is still the best option out there. Even on an HDTV, XBMC looks snazzy and works very well. News Flash: DVDs continue to work and look fine to spite the fancy commercials for blu-ray madness.

Besides, what else is my Xbox going to be used for, playing games? Pfft. As if I had time.

OMG PON1ES!!!!!11!one!!!

*shudder*
*twitch*
... . .