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While the top quality stuff might last, my own personal experience with el cheapo SSDs is that they go bad quickly with moderate (in my case laptop) use due to shabby wear levelling. Others are also warning about (cheap) SSDs throwing away data too. Such SSDs are often the ones you are going to encounter so while the majority of SSDs out there show this behaviour I think it's a warning worth mentioning...

Uhhm, Jamie Zawinski blogged about this on Feb 11, slashdot. In case anyone was interested. He runs a club in SF; he received a shakedown from Yelp!

Perhaps most bad reviews come from picky eaters?

Online reviews simply are not trustworthy. No review is, really. You can't tell me what I like, and vice versa. We can probably agree that rats should not be running around the restaurant. We cannot agree on the proper seasoning levels and the drinks. Who knows what happened to your dish before it came out of the kitchen? If you dine out, you regularly place blind trust in the servers and the cooks. Why then compound this by trusting some guy with a yelp! account, who could be a shill?

I was actually looking for one of these the other day, not to be my main IDE, but for when I was out and about and away from my computer. I came across http://codeide.com/ which is mentioned in TFA as well as several other places, but the site doesn't seem to work..

Their old blog is still live ( http://codeide.livejournal.com/ ) but it links to the new blog which is now dead. (last week it was giving me a copy of the home page.)

Does anybody know what these guys are up to?

http://jwz.livejournal.com/1002269.html

Hey, you with the finger on the down-moderation button! No, JWZ isn't just some schmuck with a livejournal account! In fact, he is probably the one person who it makes the most sense to link to in this discussion*.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski

*(and not just because he will hate it)

Jamie Zawinsky talked about the dirt under the shiny Yelp logo recently: http://jwz.livejournal.com/1002269.html

50-50 at worst, and up to 96% at best

What the heck does that mean?

Gel electrophoresis using drinking straws:
http://maradydd.livejournal.com/417631.html

DiYBio Club:
http://io9.com/5014059/a-homebrew-club-for-biogeeks

Home-brew science is becoming more possible.

Yeah, the human story of EA is a good read. Wouldn't want to work there, even if the pay was good.

Web 2.0: We make the apps. You make the content. We keep the money.

Web 2.1: You make the content. You make the apps. We keep the money.

It's interesting that it took so long for the wave of interest to catch on about this date. I remember blogging about the rollover to 1,111,111,111 back in March of 2005. And I've been looking forward to February 13, 2009 ever since.

Unix Time's 1111111111 Second Countdown

It's actually quite exhilarating -- esp. for us hardcore tech geeks -- to think that we will soon witness the last significant numerological date in computer history during our lifetime (using decimal notation at least, so long as the standard for Unix time maintains signed 32-bit integers).

--Randall

Indeed. BUt I feel there is also a lot more that "Linux" would need to do besides just a single distro, none of which is interesting to the Linux community.

http://reverse-entropy.livejournal.com/

The alleged proposed law is about truth in advertising. They say they don't sell to kids. First, such a statement doesn't seem legally binding or even legally defined as "advertising." It is incredibly vague. Were Utah to sue say EA or someone else then EA could claim that in that context they meant "kids" to include anyone under the age of 7 or something.

Secondly, in most cases entertainment companies aren't the people selling the product. EA doesn't sell the games (except perhaps on their website), Gamestop and Wal-Mart do. Therefore they could argue that they are advertising the product but another party is the one selling it.

Finally, I would be surprised if this law even surfaces since 90% of everything Jacko says never happens. I'm still waiting for him to start jackandgoliath.com which he said he was going to start back in February of 2006 http://gamepolitics.livejournal.com/203965.html

Horror writers also have it really hard, and traditionally always have. While recently (within the past few years) horror has experienced an uptick of popularity (especially within the vampire and zombie genres, as unfortunately is shown by Stephenie Meyer's successful Twilight), overall it is extremely difficult to make a living in the horror field.

In one of the past few issues of Cemetery Dance magazine, Brian Keene (an average working-man pulp horror writer with a few novels under his belt) gave a no-holds-barred interview where he basically states that one would have to be pretty insane to attempt entrance to the horror market. He says, about becoming a full-time writer: "Never. Never in a million years. I expected to work in a foundry or a call center for the rest of my life, and occasionally get a poem or story published in some small press fanzine. ... I got incredibly lucky. ... Beyond that, maybe it's because I'm a realist about this. ... I view it as a business." He also talks about how much work he does: "I was writing [two books] at the same time - one book from 6 AM to noon and the other from 1 PM to 6 PM. Seven days a week." Keene's main success is from Leisure, a mass market paperback house, and Bantam, an imprint of Random House.

A lot of horror's survival is dependent on the specialty press, who tend to print limited editions of books that may be hard sells to major publishers. The internet does play a role in this, where fledgling new writers join into groups on forums for support. Brian Keene was also one of these, part of the "Horrornet Cabal", an informal group who met at horrornet.com (now defunct). This group also included mentors like Richard Laymon and Brian Hodge, allowing writers like Tim Lebbon and Tom Piccirilli to rise up from the sludge on the bottom of the 'net.

As an unpublished horror author myself, I like to think I understand the punishing nature of the industry. Keene thinks it's impossible for an author to write a novel in a dark room and have it sell - that self-promotion is a required part of an author's work - and while I'd like to disagree, I'm not sure I can. Like Keene says in the interview, that if you're a mid-list author then you receive none of the publisher's promotional budget and instead your book will sink or swim on the bookrack based on the whims of the masses, you may not have a lot of options for self-promotion. Yet, good writing should stand on its own. I've been writing seriously for two years (I've felt the call for decades) and, while I have my share of rejection slips, I believe the main reason why I've not been published is because I haven't written anything "good enough". An example of this can be found at http://tyrus568.livejournal.com/. Pulp, and pulp in bad form.

Any author knows that being published online by an online mag is only a mediocre step up from nothing. Having your name on a bookshelf or in a print magazine is the defining factor. This may change in the future, but for now, the internet is predominated by wannabe "writers" and hacks.

I am quite elated at the fact that this GNOME developer says KDE 4.2 rocks . Now, if the two teams could combine resources to churn out an awesome desktop environment (preferably KDE based), that would make the Linux ecosystem even more relevant in today's environment.

I am quite elated at the fact that this GNOME developer says KDE 4.2 rocks . Now, if the two teams could combine resources to churn out an awesome desktop environment (preferably KDE based), that would make the Linux ecosystem even more relevant in today's environment.

From your homepage

http://abelits.livejournal.com/
11:25 pm October 6th, 2008
I finally made Ubuntu properly suspend and resume on XO, so now I don't have to wait for it to boot up when I carry it around.

05:01 am April 27th, 2008
Ubuntu installation on XO laptop

Right so it took you six months to get suspend working on an XO, and yet ACPI works flawlessly on Linux.

The thing is if someone is paying you to test some device's S3 support, spending even six minutes getting your test laptop to suspend properly even without the device is going to make you complain. Especially if that same laptop suspends and resumes just fine in Windows.

LOL at the MS Paint pictures of you BTW. I can see why Bad Ass Boutique thinks your some kind of commissar

http://abelits.livejournal.com/35021.html#cutid1

You remind me of the Yugoslav tourist board people who told me and my parents very sternly that there was coffee in all supermarkets when we complained that we couldn't find any on holiday there back in the 80's.

The system is perfect, right? Anyone criticizing it is lying and needs to be browbeaten into silence?

You know if you really want to help you actually need to fix bugs, not just lecture people who talk about them that they are wrong and no bugs exist.

Linux sucks for ACPI and covering up the bugs will just mean it will continue to suck. Ironically people like you are doing far more damage to free software than the Windows fanboys you rave about on the Internet.

From your homepage

http://abelits.livejournal.com/
11:25 pm October 6th, 2008
I finally made Ubuntu properly suspend and resume on XO, so now I don't have to wait for it to boot up when I carry it around.

05:01 am April 27th, 2008
Ubuntu installation on XO laptop

Right so it took you six months to get suspend working on an XO, and yet ACPI works flawlessly on Linux.

The thing is if someone is paying you to test some device's S3 support, spending even six minutes getting your test laptop to suspend properly even without the device is going to make you complain. Especially if that same laptop suspends and resumes just fine in Windows.

LOL at the MS Paint pictures of you BTW. I can see why Bad Ass Boutique thinks your some kind of commissar

http://abelits.livejournal.com/35021.html#cutid1

You remind me of the Yugoslav tourist board people who told me and my parents very sternly that there was coffee in all supermarkets when we complained that we couldn't find any on holiday there back in the 80's.

The system is perfect, right? Anyone criticizing it is lying and needs to be browbeaten into silence?

You know if you really want to help you actually need to fix bugs, not just lecture people who talk about them that they are wrong and no bugs exist.

Linux sucks for ACPI and covering up the bugs will just mean it will continue to suck. Ironically people like you are doing far more damage to free software than the Windows fanboys you rave about on the Internet.

ACPI sucks on Linux. E.g.

http://mjg59.livejournal.com/96270.html
Other OSes get the same values as Linux, other than the OSYS field. Now, what do these writes do? They're all to PCI config space, so since the machine in question is a 945/ICH7 machine we have publically available docs. A bit of digging later and it shows that the firmware is disabling PCIE active state link control and programming more conservative timings for entry into the C4 processor idle power saving state. In other words, certain bits of power management functionality are compromised if it detects that it's running anything other than Vista. Weirdly, it also flags the HPET as present but invisible on Linux, but I suspect that's an oversight rather than anything deliberate.

Why would they do this? I've no idea. I suspect it's something to do with the degree of platform validation performed rather than a subtle attempt to degrade Linux's battery life on the hardware (frankly, we do a good enough job of that ourselves right now), but this is exactly the kind of reason we removed _OSI("Linux") support from the kernel. Vendors will do stupid things with it.

There are two issues here. One is that vendors don't test with it, the other issue is that the developers don't test it with enough hardware. Ok, that's one issue. The manufacturers don't care either way and developers don't test all kernel releases on all hardware.

Because of this lack of testing the Linux ACPI code is buggy, which is what Matthew Garrett spends time working on.

Actually there are deeper issues like this one

http://advogato.org/article/913.html
The single biggest problem is video hardware. The spec doesn't require the BIOS to reprogram the video hardware at all, and so often it'll come back in an entirely unprogrammed state. This is an issue, since we (in general) have absolutely no idea how to bring a video card up from scratch. One of the easiest workarounds is to execute code from the video BIOS in the same way that the system BIOS does on machine startup. vbetool lets you do this from userspace, and it works a surprisingly large amount of the time. However, there's no guarantee that it'll be successful. Vendors often unmap that section of BIOS after the system has been brought up, since they've got far more BIOS code than will fit in the BIOS region of the legacy address space. In the long run, the only solution is drivers that know how to program an entirely uninitialised chip. The new modesetting branch of the Intel driver aims to do this, as do the developers of noveau.

See the hardware manufacturer writes a Windows driver that does this right. Maybe they write a Linux driver, maybe they don't. If they do, that driver is most likely closed source like NVidia's and therefore not installed by default. Or it is open source and not complete yet (ATI's). Or you can use the freetard reverse engineered NVidia driver which is not complete. Hell even the closed source driver might have been broken by some freetard developer trying to persuade them to open up by breaking it as often has he can.

Basically hardware manufacturers by and large care about Windows working because it has 90% market share. They don't care about Linux. Since the Linux developers don't test and patch on all hardware it is up to the end users to kludge around the defects.

So suppose you make USB widgets and want to support Linux. You want to test S3 or S4 but you need to fiddle around getting S3 and S4 to work at all on the laptop before you can test your driver's support for power management.

Of course the freetard response to all this is to blame the manufacturers. Famously Ryan Farmer accused Foxconn of a conspiracy to break Linux because his Foxxconn motherboard had these issues

http://ubuntu-virginia.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php

The client makes USB peripherals not laptops. They have a Linux driver which supports power management. Unfortunately pretty much all Linux distributions suck at power management. Poor battery life, S3 and S4 broken.

And if you read this blog written by one of the Linux kernel ACPI developers it's clear that this is due to limitations in Linux's ACPI support -

http://mjg59.livejournal.com/?skip=20

Wow. If that is your favorite thing to complain about, I guess Gnome must be pretty good...

Whether or not the cursor blinks is a non-trivial issue: http://mjg59.livejournal.com/102406.html

It *is* the small configuration options that matter in a DE. At least to some of us. They may seem trivial to you, but some of us rely on little things like this for our workflow. For me, it's KDE's active borders feature.

I just mentioned it because it was representative of the kind of philosophy and design decisions that go into GNOME.

What, like this sort of design?
http://jwz.livejournal.com/840992.html?thread=16291104#t16291104

I feel like there are much more substantial problems for Linux to do much better; things that have nothing to do with development. I admit that Linux is basically functionally good enough, easy to install, and has reasonable apps, but ...

What would it take to make Linux the #1 desktop?
http://reverse-entropy.livejournal.com/

Wire up a USB connector and write a driver to support it under Mac OSX, Linux and Windows.

While it's not for the Atari tablet (and also not USB), a couple of years ago I made an adapter for my Commodore KoalaPad to connect it to the PC joystick port: http://unixplumber.livejournal.com/14324.html

By the way, I wonder if there's a way to use a joystick as a core pointer in X... I guess it's Google time!

Maybe Obamaslash?(Not Safe for Work)

A while back you mentioned about the USB probing could be made faster (and asked why I was using pciehp). Well you were right USB probing DID get faster (boot tracing SVG of EeePC 900) and I no longer need pciehp on my EeePC 900.

I bet that making the kernel more asynchronous than it already is (with the current async patches) won't save any more significant amounts of time on this particular setup though! : )

I'm aware of furry drama. I have a friend who is a furry and he lives communally in an apartment with other furries in which the roommates rotate every three months or so. Drama city, according to him.

Sounds awful. I'm sharing a flat with another fur since over a year now and, thankfully, there's no furry drama involved and it helped me moving out of my parents house :)

There's no reason to put scare quotes on self-esteem.

I know what self-esteem stands for, but thanks for summarizing anyway. I put the quotes there out of habit because, back in school, I heard that word way too often. Essentially, if you were a bully you'd get lots and lots of second chances and therapy, but if you were the target of their bullshit, well, you get told that you've got low self-esteem and that's it. That's why I'm still passively-annoyed (heh) when someone mentions self-esteem.

It is grossly cruel the way people treat furries (and emos).

It really isn't that bad, at least for furs. Sure, we get trolled and some people really take that personally, but that's all online. Now, offline, in the real world, it's not that bad really and those who protest furry conventions look way dumber and socially retarded than us. See for yourself:

Look at them, all alone in the rain. The dude in the lab coat, head of the convention, later went out to them to have a chat. They were very timid and unable to explain what they were doing (can't find the newspaper article, sadly).

Same folks as above I think

Fail

I don't know, maybe /b/tards and the like are bellow furries. They act all tough on the 'net, but look at them. Hope that wasn't too much chatter :>

Believe it or not it's surprisingly hard to have a player/OS combination that will play ALL the types of video out there. I think the most complete combination is some version of Windows with Quicktime, RealPlayer and VLC installed (and that probably won't play everything) with Flash installed for typical web video.

It's another case of "if someone hasn't done it for you then it's a pain".

And there I was spending so much time trying to figure out how to create links in Facebook to all of the better social networking sites that I actually use and have meaningful posts on.

The best I could come up with was a "note" to add links to my LJ, Slashdot, OKCupid (it's more than just a dating site, dammit, or at least it used to be a lot geekier), etc. profiles. Of course, no one visiting my Facebook profile can actually see the note unless they're explicitly looking for it.

Anyway, I highly recommend this post to anyone else who's trying to mash up their various social networking sites:
http://zarfmouse.livejournal.com/264655.html

It doesn't really help your Facebook friends find your useful blogs, though.

Anyway, if someone could help me find a guide to mashup Gallery2 with LiveJournal, Flickr, YouTube, etc., I'd appreciate it. My goal is to have most of the posting of my blog entries, pictures, and video with geolocation tagging hosted on my personal Linux server, but then automatically uploaded / posted to the various external sites to leverage their community, comments, etc.

I have a rotary phone, you insensitive clod!

I have a rotary phone, you insensitive clod!

1. Don't.
2. Really. Just don't.

Don't do it unless you want to take on the job of cleaning the shit out every time you go over there. If you want to visit frequently and they like you visiting frequently, and spending your time fixing their damn computer, fine. But, uh, no.

Note that even Ubuntu isn't immune - I commend to you this story from Liam On Linux.

You might want to take a look at Top 100 Best Software Engineering Books, Ever (if you want to go by what is popular) or The Best Programming Books (which seems to be more diverse).

Personally I really liked the Mythical Man Month (one of the few library books I borrowed as an undergraduate and I've recently reread it and still like it) and Peopleware (very funny) but both of these are more about software engineering (and how it goes wrong) rather than practical hands on programming. However they are both short and entertaining. Code Complete is very authoritative (but big). These aren't books you are going to gravitate towards if you are just starting to program for the first time though so I'll just mention I found Java in Nutshell useful (but others are not so keen on it).

Your borrowers are probably going to want those "Learn in 24 hours..." or "...for Dummies" though. It would be nice to know what the most loaned books turned out to be in year's time (might make a good Slashdot article : )

Here's a good phrase, "Morality is Marketing."

Corporations tend not to care about morality. Many of the companies that complain the loudest about immorality, have done evil things themselves in the past. Electronic Arts is a good example, as is Sony.

Now, I'm pretty sure that Microsoft has never done anything morally wrong, ever, but I could be wrong about that. I'm open to the possiblity. (Incidentally, I hope people's sarcasm detectors are working.)

Does that morally excuse Software Piracy? (Shrug) It's kind of irrelevant to me whether it does or not, I just know I consider it laughable when almost any corporation appeals to "morality."

So, corporation use morality as just another tool in their marketing toolkit. I'm sure 20th Century Fox complains about morality when someone "pirates" Jingle All the Way without any trace of shame. (From the article about them "pirating" the script for that movie, "They obviously thought nobody would have the clout to fight.")

DRM is a business strategy, anti-"piracy" lobbying is another, and commercials on DVDs saying "you wouldn't steal a car" or the hoary old, "don't copy that floppy" are another.

Now, here's the thing a fine argument against piracy is that if companies can't make money in the business of selling copies, they might change to a business model that we won't like, cut back on product or something else. Sometimes these are uttered in the same breath as appeals to morality, as if to conflate them as being the same thing. However, what they really are are appeals to self interest or at best to community interest.

Heck, recently corporations have started to use moralistic sounding language to attack used product. (The difference in the price of new and used product just proves that most things they are selling are at ridiculously inflated prices. As indeed does the prevalence of piracy.)

None of the above should be considered an endorsement of piracy. I don't pirate games myself, but it's not because of morality.

Hmm... Pony!

Point 1) It keeps data just fine so long as it's plugged in

Apparently not. You seem to be ignorant. Let's fix that. :)
Follow along with me:
http://kernelslacker.livejournal.com/89113.html

Step 1:
# mkfs.ext2 -cc /dev/sdk
This formats a block device (like the iram) and performs a R/W bad block test.
At the end of the formatting and testing operation mkfs.ext2 prints:

Block 0 in primary superblock/group descriptor area bad.
Blocks 0 through 2 must be good in order to build a filesystem.
Aborting....

This indicates that something went wrong with the formatting operation. This usually indicates a problem with the block device.

Step 2)
# hexdump /dev/sdk | head

This prints out the first ten lines of the output from hexdump. Hexdump dumps the data that's on the block device. On my ext2-formatted devices I see this:
hexdump /dev/sda1 |head
0000000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
*
0000400 4e70 0000 39a4 0001 0fae 0000 10c0 0001

That is, 1K of zeros, followed by data.
So, further proof that something's wrong with this device.

Step 3)
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdk bs=512

This fills the block device with zeros.

Step 4)
# hexdump /dev/sdk | head

Print out what's on the block device.
We should see this:
0000000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
*
7FF7FE00

We don't. This device can't hold data for twenty seconds while on mains power, let alone hours w/out.

2) I don't profit from Gigabyte selling more, so why would I send this guy mine?

*shrug* Don't send it, then.

If you wan't "proof" check out any of the iram youtube links. This guy set up 8 in a raid:

The proof that I want is the mix of hardware that makes this device not trash the data that's written to it! I *already* know how fast a RAM disk is. Stop selling the sizzle. I need to know how what's in the steak.

I disagree. It would have been better if it supported SATA2 instead of just 1, but I put 2 of them with 4GB ram each as a striped raid and the performance was literally jaw dropping,

That's lovely. :)
The only reliable jaw-dropping evidence that I have of this thing's performance is its complete inability to:
1) Retain the data that has been written to it.
2) Maintain a constant throughput while randomly writing across the device.

If you could ship a functioning iram (with RAM that makes it work) to this guy and get him to report on its success, then I'd run out next month and purchase one. Until then, you're just some AC making unsubstantiated claims on /.. :)

Point 1) It keeps data just fine so long as it's plugged in (plus a few hours from the onboard battery).

2) I don't profit from Gigabyte selling more, so why would I send this guy mine?

If you wan't "proof" check out any of the iram youtube links. This guy set up 8 in a raid:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNPPRhPV7y0

And here's the performance that led to me getting one, then another:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PiYgBhAkAM&feature=related

In Jan 2009, not quite as impressive, but in Jan 2007, it was pretty Fscking awesome - without the need to to fsck.

Granted, if you want to ship a server cross country, you will lose your data, which is why, in my GP post, I mentioned the whole "clone it to the standard" HD in my original post.

I disagree. It would have been better if it supported SATA2 instead of just 1, but I put 2 of them with 4GB ram each as a striped raid and the performance was literally jaw dropping,

That's lovely. :)
The only reliable jaw-dropping evidence that I have of this thing's performance is its complete inability to:
1) Retain the data that has been written to it.
2) Maintain a constant throughput while randomly writing across the device.

If you could ship a functioning iram (with RAM that makes it work) to this guy and get him to report on its success, then I'd run out next month and purchase one. Until then, you're just some AC making unsubstantiated claims on /.. :)

Point 1) It keeps data just fine so long as it's plugged in (plus a few hours from the onboard battery).

2) I don't profit from Gigabyte selling more, so why would I send this guy mine?

If you wan't "proof" check out any of the iram youtube links. This guy set up 8 in a raid:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNPPRhPV7y0

And here's the performance that led to me getting one, then another:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PiYgBhAkAM&feature=related

In Jan 2009, not quite as impressive, but in Jan 2007, it was pretty Fscking awesome - without the need to to fsck.

Granted, if you want to ship a server cross country, you will lose your data, which is why, in my GP post, I mentioned the whole "clone it to the standard" HD in my original post.

OH SQUEE!

This is something that I ran into just last Thursday!
I assume that you're manually entering your display config into your xorg.conf? Stop that. You *NEED* to be using xrandr 1.2. If you're using a modern distro, you ought to have xrandr 1.2 support.

Check out the block after the first EDIT in this document for more info:
http://simoncion.livejournal.com/307011.html

Seriously, this stuff is slick as black ice. We're finally within pissing distance of Windows' multi-monitor configuration tools!

Also, if you have *any* questions about this, feel free to contact me. My email address should be easy to figure out... I have a gmail account. :)

I disagree. It would have been better if it supported SATA2 instead of just 1, but I put 2 of them with 4GB ram each as a striped raid and the performance was literally jaw dropping,

That's lovely. :)
The only reliable jaw-dropping evidence that I have of this thing's performance is its complete inability to:
1) Retain the data that has been written to it.
2) Maintain a constant throughput while randomly writing across the device.

If you could ship a functioning iram (with RAM that makes it work) to this guy and get him to report on its success, then I'd run out next month and purchase one. Until then, you're just some AC making unsubstantiated claims on /.. :)

I disagree. It would have been better if it supported SATA2 instead of just 1, but I put 2 of them with 4GB ram each as a striped raid and the performance was literally jaw dropping,

That's lovely. :)
The only reliable jaw-dropping evidence that I have of this thing's performance is its complete inability to:
1) Retain the data that has been written to it.
2) Maintain a constant throughput while randomly writing across the device.

If you could ship a functioning iram (with RAM that makes it work) to this guy and get him to report on its success, then I'd run out next month and purchase one. Until then, you're just some AC making unsubstantiated claims on /.. :)

"Wow. Seriously.

The i-RAM is in another league in IOMeter...

Heh. The i-RAM is a finicky chunk of trash.
http://kernelslacker.livejournal.com/89113.html

I disagree. It would have been better if it supported SATA2 instead of just 1, but I put 2 of them with 4GB ram each as a striped raid and the performance was literally jaw dropping, laughter inducing (in a good way) "OMG" fast. XP booted in 6 seconds. Not resumed, full cold boot (not including the bios power on test of course).

Using it as a web/db server was a hell of a lot cheaper than moving to a 64 bit system at the time. 4GB on the 32 bit host, plus 8GB via the raid effectively gave you 12GB of ram on a 32 bit system.

Niche? Yes. Finicky? Maybe, but it was fine for me as a raid - just clone it to the standard hard disk on shutdown and reclone from HD to iram if the battery backup doesn't last long enough on a server move/ship.

I'd pick up a new one if it supported 2GB chips and sata 2. As others mention, it's great for performance killing logs too.

"Wow. Seriously.

The i-RAM is in another league in IOMeter...

Heh. The i-RAM is a finicky chunk of trash.
http://kernelslacker.livejournal.com/89113.html

Kernel developer Dave Jones reckons that using noop with SSD may not be the best because with other schedulers the ioscheduler will do "merging of adjacent read requests".

Even Microsoft's flagship product Vista has Six unpatched vulnerabilities.

These are all unpatched widely known vulnerabilities, and are only the ones in Microsoft's own product. Consider all the third party vulnerabilities, in downloadable codecs for example, that the design of Microsoft's platforms makes it so easy for crackers to exploit.

In comparison, all of the major Linux based distros have an excellent record of closing known vulnerabilities within days if not hours, before the holes get a chance to be exploited. Also SELinux is becoming more widely deployed to secure applications against such threats..At least with Linux there are existing concrete mechanisms in place ( Vulnerability and threat mitigation features in Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora ), and currently deployable ( Writing policy for confined SELinux users ) to provide a locked down secured environment for Linux desktop users inside an organization.

Also from a more abstract point of view, read Increased security through open source.

If your using the Microsoft platform, then your abetting the people deploying botnets.

Read this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_Raines
or this:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0DE7DB153EF933A0575AC0A96F958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all

(1999) "The action, which will begin as a pilot program involving 24 banks in 15 markets -- including the New York metropolitan region -- will encourage those banks to extend home mortgages to individuals whose credit is generally not good enough to qualify for conventional loans.

And: "''Fannie Mae has expanded home ownership for millions of families in the 1990's by reducing down payment requirements,'' said Franklin D. Raines, Fannie Mae's chairman and chief executive officer. ''Yet there remain too many borrowers whose credit is just a notch below what our underwriting has required who have been relegated to paying significantly higher mortgage rates in the so-called subprime market.''"

The Community Reinvestment Act also let unscrupulous lawyers sue companies that they thought weren't making enough bad loans. This included a certain Barrack Obama, Esquire. The CRA was heavily expanded under the Clinton Administration. That's what Card was talking about - the guy writing that letter to the editor of the Kansas City Star (which is all that was that you linked) doesn't know what he's talking about, pure and simple.

I wrote a long analysis of the politically correct roots of the subprime meltdown here:
http://shakauvm.livejournal.com/57671.html

Interesting... didn't know Americans pronounce foyer like that.

http://forthright.livejournal.com/151045.html

I made this just for you, boss!

http://simoncion.livejournal.com/306396.html

You mean drizzle?

I document it here. It is Apple Problem ID 5691957.

You can guarantee that M$ will not upgrade them if they can't even run windows XP out of the box. The issue is that Windows doesn't run on open firmware, which is the default for OLPC.