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http://www.elx.com.au/item/ELS1003?elx=1f17efed434 e93da647a378f0068385f

Good God.

Why do you Mac shills have to tout a Mac product for every slashdot story not matter how tangentally related?

The Mini-ITX is vastly more flexible then a Mac mini - and hence targets a different market.

Want to run a Mac Mini off DC? Sure, buy an inverter and hope to god it doesn't max out its 240W PSU.

Want to run a mini-ITX off DC? Sure! No problem, buy a carkit and away you go. 60W. No inverter needed. Power consumption more controllable.

I'm not saying the mac-minis are worse then a mini-itx (they're great for their target market - and I reccommend them to anyone wanting a basic, hassle-free internet/music machine), but they are targetting a different market to mini-itx.

Here's a pic of the case I have at home btw (and am writing this post on)

Good God.

Why do you Mac shills have to tout a Mac product for every slashdot story not matter how tangentally related?

The Mini-ITX is vastly more flexible then a Mac mini - and hence targets a different market.

Want to run a Mac Mini off DC? Sure, buy an inverter and hope to god it doesn't max out its 240W PSU.

Want to run a mini-ITX off DC? Sure! No problem, buy a carkit and away you go. 60W. No inverter needed. Power consumption more controllable.

I'm not saying the mac-minis are worse then a mini-itx (they're great for their target market - and I reccommend them to anyone wanting a basic, hassle-free internet/music machine), but they are targetting a different market to mini-itx.

Here's a pic of the case I have at home btw (and am writing this post on)

That sounds fairly darn civilized to me. In particular, I'm much less bothered by a keyserver approach when I know the game won't just stop working if the company that makes it encounters difficulties. Keyserver based approaches seem relatively inoffensive, and I imageine they'd stop a lot of casual copying. I can understand why they have a bad rep (it could be done very badly, ie game not playable/installable if the key server is unreachable so you no longer even really "own" the game; privacy issues) but honestly if I'm stuck with copy protection I'll take a keyserver system over CD-based systems any day.

I'm glad to hear about the lack of any requirement for a CD in the drive. I'm pleasantly surprised to find that you have a local reseller that I already have dealings with. Given that this game sounds like just my thing (almost as much as the X-com games, Star Control 2, Master of Orion II, System Shock II or Deus Ex), I'll certainly have to put my money where my mouth is. I may also have to grab Postal simply to have it on the shelf ;-)

I'd still be interested to know your views on the effectiveness of traditional CD-based copy protection, given the comments I made earlier.

By the way, congrats on being brave enough to take on this market. I'd be pretty wary myself, what with binary compatibility issues across distros and versions, a significant proportion of spending-allergic or foaming zealot users who equate free with gratis, etc. I find it quite challenging enough maintaining software that is recompiled for each distro/version. *shudder*autotools*shudder.

Show me a version that doesn't take up valuable PCI real-estate, make it mountable in an internal 3.5" bay, and then I might be interested.

http://www.elx.com.au/item/CFIDE1

http://www.newegg.com/product/Product.asp?Item=N82 E16820160137&CMP=OTC-Froogle&ATT=Transcend+4GB+Com pact+Flash+(CF)+Card+Model+TS4GCF45

4GB, populated, probably fits in a 2.5" drive bay let alone 3.5". There's actually versions that have 2.5" connectors and mounting brackets so you can use them directly in a laptop, but I couldn't quickly google a price on them.

Price fixing generally involves colluding and coming up with a particular price. One only has to look at the vast range of prices the various vendors charge for their distributions to know that it is false at face value.

Without collusion I don't see how there can be any fixing and I don't see any collusion here.
The FSF wrote a licence for whatever reasons make sense to them.
Each vendor independantly chooses to use the licence for their own reasons.

One of those reasons is surely because it helps provide an efficient (cheap) development model but I don't see that as price fixing. Novell, Red Hat, the FSF etc etc aren't getting around a table and discussing price. The vendors are just choosing an efficient software source for themselves and the FSF isn't doing anything related to pricing at all.

Price fixing generally involves colluding and coming up with a particular price. One only has to look at the vast range of prices the various vendors charge for their distributions to know that it is false at face value.

Without collusion I don't see how there can be any fixing and I don't see any collusion here.
The FSF wrote a licence for whatever reasons make sense to them.
Each vendor independantly chooses to use the licence for their own reasons.

One of those reasons is surely because it helps provide an efficient (cheap) development model but I don't see that as price fixing. Novell, Red Hat, the FSF etc etc aren't getting around a table and discussing price. The vendors are just choosing an efficient software source for themselves and the FSF isn't doing anything related to pricing at all.

We can chose if we want to buy a power pack, professional, server, etc of (Your Favorite Distro here) or we can just spend time downloading it and hunting arround the net for the ad ons we want

I've used a number of Distros Slackware, Redhat, Debian, Mandrake, for Redhat and Mandrake sometimes I've bought the boxed sets and other times I installed the downloadable editions (purchased for $5-15AUD from a local CD seller (I dont have broadband 8( )) and I must say I haven't really gained anything out the boxed sets and I don't read the Manuals (Maybe it is because sometimes they are not very readable).

In the past, before I saw the light I used to buy lots of M$ software, but still thought it was porly written, but I didn't think I had any choice. In my work place we buy a lot of poor software, but there are no open source competitors to those packages, so we buy it because we have no choice (except write our own)

So with open source software unless you really think you are getting something more out of the "pay for" than the "free"(as in beer) why are you going to buy. I remember that my powerpack of Mandrake 8.2, was more buggy that my download edition of 8.1! That put me off box sets forever, but the download editions of Mandrake got progressively worse with 9.0, 9.1, 9.2 (haven't tried 10.0 yet).