I semi-regularly ssh into a server that's running linux 2.2, and AIUI the home directories for that and the desktops in the building (that I do use regularly) are served off an ancient SGI mainframe. I also regularly use a server running AIX 5.3; I have no idea how old the hardware for that is (AIX 5.3 came out in 2004).

Thus, I'm reasonably sure 15+ years old is not an overstatement. Yay for universities.

That said, even my desktop is over 6 at this point.

"6-10, and some of them haven't heard of my hometown"? Forget that, I can stay within my state and most of the people I meet haven't heard of my hometown. Some of us don't live in cities, you know.

Who was the retailer? We need to know, so we can avoid them.

Beats me, you'd have to ask on the coreboot mailing list.

My best guess, though, is yes. (Excluding, of course, Windows startup.)

Hard to say. I'm pretty sure the 3 second time had a lot of "typical" linux components stripped out, but note that you won't get a shell until everything's finished loading, while X can be started in parallel with other things and be usable while other components start. I believe some work was done that got it under 5 seconds from init to usable. There's still the bios time (0 with a tricked-out coreboot setup) and the time while the kernel starts up before init (this takes 2-3 seconds for me, no idea what "normal" or "fast" is). That adds up to ~7-8 seconds.

One thing to note is that storing the kernel directly in EEPROM lets you skip the bootloader entirely. Bootloaders are usually pretty fast, but they usually have a programmed delay of a few seconds to let you choose a kernel or whatever.

It's not really all that fast. With coreboot there's an option to flash a kernel directly to your bios chip, and skip bios and bootloader entirely. Makes kernel upgrades a pain, of course, but they got wall time from poweron to a working linux shell down to three seconds.

I'd say media files (and software, too) expand to take up as much space as internet bandwidth allows. Back in the day, if you wanted online video, it was all tiny .mpgs. Now it's HD Theora and H264. Back when I had dialup, I wouldn't have appreciated it if the only way to watch something was to wait 7 weeks for it. Now, I can get that same file in a few hours and that's an acceptable time to wait.

And of course, very much involved is packrat tendencies: we'd much rather buy another hard drive than have to delete stuff, even if we're done with it.

They're not a virus risk due to autorun if you, y'know, use a sensible OS.

This is slashdot, man, get with the program.

I don't live in a city, you insensitive clod. (And yes, that matters quite a bit in the context)

1600 FLOPs per Hz? That's actually rather impressive.

Huh. I dropped my OLPC from about 4 feet (a little less, maybe 3.5 with some forward momentum too) just a week ago. It bounced to about 1.5-2 feet, then landed again. Outdoors, hard asphalt. No damage except a tiny depression in the plastic on one corner.

Not the first time I've dropped it, either. Only thing I've broken from a drop is a tiny chunk of plastic off the headphone jack--in a ~6 foot drop onto a tile floor that hit the wall and my leg and thus didn't get the full force, but did manage to bend the 1/8th inch headphone connector.

Sounds like Dell has some catching up to do.

A book that I liked when I was younger was To Infinity and Beyond by Eli Maor. It's a sort of advanced layman's look at infinity and the closely-related zero. It includes mathematical topics your students probably haven't seen before (and won't, unless they become math majors), in enough depth to be interesting but not overwhelming (not enough to really be useful mathematically, either just to make them interested and perhaps help them be more comfortable if/when they get to higher math). It also has a lot of history. It seems to be mostly available on google book search (a bunch of random pages missing, but mostly there) so you can check it out without leaving your computer!