Obligatory xkcd.

that no one mentioned the very well written article posted on ArsTechnica yesterday about the patent system and the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. As expected, a very US-centric view on the problem, but it does raise some obvious issues. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/09/how-a-rogue-appeals-court-wrecked-the-patent-system/

We have to put Texas out of business? It would get rid of the Eastern Texas courts too!

It's real for CRTs (why do we still test these anyways?) and OLED screens. It's a myth for LCDs, including those "LED" screens everyone's touting nowadays. CRTs and OLEDs do take more power to display a white pixel because of the way they work. LCDs depend on the backlight to produce a visible image, and the backlight is always on. The only use case where the LCD had lower consumption was a totally black screen and with HardOCP: dark enough to trigger the darkening of the backlight in "dynamic" contrast (which is a farce anyways). Turn off dynamic contrast, and suddenly there will be no power savings. This isn't a story...

Not too worried about performance right now. It'll essentially be a NAS over 1Gbit/s, so as long as it's faster than that.

I was planning to build a file server using OpenSolaris in the coming weeks, but I may have to rethink that now.

Anyone know a good place to get access to ZFS in another place? Would BSD or FUSE on Linux be better?

It's more general purpose, and you can make your own UIs for it. I'm in the middle of doing one myself.

Where's BOINC? BOINC may not have as many users or processing power, but it is more diversified than Folding@home.

I don't know if I'd go as far as to say Linux will crush Windows 7 (it seems to be quite good actually), but I do believe Linux will continue creeping up in the OS share. I own three computers: a Mac running OS X Leopard, and two PCs, both of which dual-boot Linux and Windows. I've found that quite a few configuration things require diving into the command line, which is often beyond what most people expect. Example: to turn off tap-to-click on my laptop (annoying as hell!), I had to edit X's configuration file, then restart X. Restarting X isn't a problem (log out and in will do the trick), but editing a configuration file? I bet most would be scared shitless of screwing it up.