I tend to agree, the potential issue is power consumption (which tends to be higher with x86/x86_64.) My old AMD K5 with 32 Mb RAM, two ethernet cards and a wireless card served me for many years. It was running a minimal Debian with iptables & ssh. I never measured power consumption, but I'd wager it was higher than an off the shelf router.

That's how I switched from Arch to Debian on my work machine. Debootstrap works very well (and I had been using it for chroots for quite some time.)

Will you please provide a link to the $1.95 developer board? I'm only finding PIC chips for that price and not a full boards like the Launchpads & Arduinos.

If you're up to 2GB you're likely seeing a leaky plugin. Firebug, for me, seems to leak. In short, if you're seeing consistent ram usage > 500MB, you should try with all plugins disabled or in safe mode.

I'm at just over 59 hours, and it's at about 400MB* on a 64 bit Arch Linux desktop. That goes out the window when Firebug is on. It seems to leaks memory like crazy. It can easily climb over 1.5GB* in only a few hours of debugging/development.

*Rough estimates based on top

Let me help you with that

But if I'm using Bash, I obviously prefer a terminal anyways, and have no use for those fancy DE's. Obligatory "Now get off my lawn"

For OOP though, the terchniques are the same for C++, Java and C# so unless you want them to learn the C#/.NET specific parts (eg WPF, WCF, all the wizard generated bumpf) then or learn how to use Visual Studio, you might as well show them Java instead. The tooling should be better for your platform and I'm sure you can find better example code.

Well, if "MS doesn't make .NET for (his) platform", Visual Studio is totally out of the question. He's most likely on a *nix; so, he'd most likely go with something like MonoDevelop (GTK#) for an IDE and one of these may be chosen for a GUI toolkit (when he eventually gets to that): http://www.mono-project.com/Gui_Toolkits

If he wants to stick with Pascal, he could also consider Oxygene which also runs on top of the CLR/Mono. This has the advantage of using all the classes already available in Mono, but with a similar syntax.

Perhaps he doesn't understand what a niche market is. As for a Linux based gaming system, there are things like The Evo 2 from Envision: http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/Envizions-Evo-2/?kc=rss

I'm not going to say it's a realistic alternative to the current generation consoles, because it's most likely going to appeal to a similar niche market as the Uzebox (Note, the Fuzebox is a specific implementation of the Uzebox.)

*shrugs* I may not like it, but that's just how things are currently.

The part of the review I found to be quite funny was this line:

if the Department of Defense wanted to rip off a Windows theme to make their software seem familiar to their employees, why did they pick a look from fifteen years ago?

I guess the reviewer never tried IceWM before since it's looked pretty much exactly the same for about 10 years now.

MINIX 1 & 2 were teaching tools. MINIX 3, which is "loosely based somewhat on previous versions of MINIX," wants to not only be a teaching tool, but also be a serious option for small & embedded systems. Also, this new version of MINIX has only been in active development for about six years.

Anyways, I've rambled on enough. You can read more about it here: here and here

YES!

Which is exactly why you still see web apps that require IE6 and fail for pretty much anything else. They developed for a browser instead of the standard. It's sad that people still try to do this even though history has shown us it's bound to be extremely problematic.

You must be out of the loop: Intel and MeeGo. Hopefully this release will be well received and Intel will continue their work. Also note, all of the tablet developer preview in this release was totally Intel's doing.