Since I turned off automatic Windows updates I rarely worry about shutting down and rebooting.
I hope it has really good power management, because otherwise that's an extreme waste of energy.
It's funny how many slashdotters are posting to say that Windows sucks and boots slow, and of course the solution is to run Linux. I run Linux, but one of the things I'm least happy about is the horrible support for power management. None of the sleep, hibernate, etc., options work on my machine at all. I don't know the solution to the problem, either, because it sounds like the problem is basically that manufacturers refuse to openly document the registers that need to be saved when their devices go to sleep. If I had working power management, then I wouldn't need to shut down my computer so often, and I wouldn't care much what my boot times were. This is all much bigger issue on laptops, of course.
I believe one of the reasons Linux doesn't boot faster than it does is that there's a kernel feature that, for security, randomizes the addresses at which various code is loaded into memory each time you boot. This is supposed to protect against buffer overflows that jump to a fixed address in memory. The problem is that it means you can't speed up booting by simply caching an image of the initialized state of a lot of your memory in a freshly booted system.
I don't know about other people's Linux boxes, but on mine the time taken to start Gnome is comparable to the time it takes to boot into gdm. That's one of the reasons I run fluxbox rather then Gnome.
Today, there's no excuse for not encrypting your email.
I've got a good excuse: none of the people I send email to are interested in installing decryption software so that they can read the messages I send them.
Space exploration will eventually allow us to establish a human civilization on another world (e.g., Mars) as a hedge against the type of catastrophe that wiped out the dinosaurs.
This is a good argument for accomplishing crewed space travel in the next few centuries. It's not a good argument for short-term boondoggles like the space shutte (whose only purpose is to go to the ISS) anf the ISS (whose only purpose is to give the space shuttle somewhere to go).
We explore space and create important new technologies to advance our economy. It is true that, for every dollar we spend on the space program, the U.S. economy receives about $8 of economic benefit.
Lots of other types of spending by the U.S. federal government could have payoffs like this. Maybe the money should be spend on proteinomics. If this was going to be a valid argument, economists would have to have a magic wand that would allow them to predict the long-term economic result of taxing and spending to support crewed space programs, taxing and spending to do other things, or refraining from taxing and spending.
Space exploration can also serve as a stimulus for children to enter the fields of science and engineering.
Children enter those fields because they're fun, and they find they have a talent for it. This also seems to be assuming in advance the validity of all the bogus doomsday statements in the media about how we're not producing enough scientists and engineers. I teach engineering majors, and the painful truth is that many of them just aren't good enough at math and science to be engineers. They're being steered into the field by their parents, who tell them they can make a lot of money. If there are "not enough" scientists and engineers, what is that "not enough" based on? Is it not enough because employers are upset at the quality of applicants they get when they offer x dollars per year? Maybe the answer is that employers should offer more money and see if they get a better applicant pool. That's how supply and demand work.
Space exploration in an international context offers a peaceful cooperative venue that is a valuable alternative to nation state hostilities.
Last time I checked, the cold war had been over for decades, and the ISS was not a joint project of Iran, North Korea, and the U.S. In any case, there are plenty of big projects we could cooperate on with other countries. The political impetus for cooperation with the Russians on the ISS was in fact one of the reasons the ISS ended up being useless (highly inclined orbit).
National prestige requires that the U.S. continue to be a leader in space, and that includes human exploration.
National prestige requires that we end the USA Patriot act, close down Guantanamo, apologize to the world for Abu Ghraib, and end the U.S. military's practice of kidnapping the families of Iraqi insurgents (see Fiasco : The American Military Adventure in Iraq by Thomas E. Ricks). Funny how this national prestige thing seems to be a matter of individual opinion.
Exploration of space will provide humanity with an answer to the most fundamental questions: Are we alone? Are there other forms of life beside those on Earth?
If that's what we want, then SETI would be a better investment than crewed spaceflight.
In addition to the points made by the other posts above, I want to point out that for many applications you probably want to use a solid state drive anyway. My NSLU2 has a 16 Gb flash drive as its storage ($150), and that's big enough to hold my whole music collection in mp3 format. The flash drive is more compact than a spinning platter, and uses less power.
I suspect you spent something like $200, and got a system that takes up a lot of space and draws at least 50 watts. For under $100, you could buy an NSLU2, which draws 4 watts and is the size of a papeback book.
I have an NSLU2, and am very happy with it. Some reasons to prefer it over something like the KPC: it's less than half the price, it only draws 4 watts, and it's the size of a paperback book. I think it's important to understand what "slow" means in the parent post. It doesn't mean that it's slow as a file server, it means that it's got a slow cpu. Serving up files is not a cpu-intensive job, so the slow cpu has no impact of file-serving performance. I'm using it as a music server, and decoding an mp3 only uses about 1% of its cpu power.
A lot of people, including me, are using an NSLU2 for that. Cisco officially says it's OK with them if people modify the firmware, install Debian on it, etc. The price is under $100, and it only draws 4 watts, so it's a much better choice than a general-purpose computer for an always-on machine.
The article linked to from the slashdot article was missing some info, such as what linux distro it will have preinstalled. This one says it will be Ubuntu. All I could find on shuttle's own site was this press release.
It's good to see Tandy/Radio Shack represented on the list, but I think they should have included the TRS-80 Model I. It had horrible keyboard bounce: practically any time you hit a key, it would produce the same character multiple times on the screen. You could buy aftermarket software that tried to get rid of the effect. Also, although this is not strictly a keyboard issue, the character generator could only produce uppercase on the screen, reportedly saving Radio Shack 35 cents on every machine produced. A lot of the early-model TRS-80's also had bimetallic connections between the components, so the connectors would corrode rapidly. Every few weeks, you had to rub off the corrosion with a pencil eraser.
And yet we are judged by twelve people who could not escape jury duty.
Please think before propagating this meme, which is scornful and dismissive toward people who are trying to do their civic duty. People have been fighting and dying since 1215 AD to get the right to trial by jury. We're lucky to have it. When you say this, here's how it comes off: (1) you think you're way smarter than your peers; (2) you want to weasel out of jury duty; and (3) you want to complain that if you're involved in a jury trial, the people who (unlike you) actually do their duty are too dumb, so you're afraid you won't be happy with their verdict.
Most people think the magnification of a telescope is the most important number, whereas astronomers are typically more interested in the light-gathering power, as measured by the aperture. What's really being increased by a factor of 90 is neither the magnification nor the sensitivity, it's apparently the product of the sensitivity and the area of the field of view. The argument seems to be that this is an important figure of merit if you're doing a survey of faint objects, such as very distant galaxies.
...move along. No price, no specific release date, not yet in beta, no evidence that they actually have working hardware.
The sweet spot right now seems to be around 16 or 32 Mb. You can get an 16 Mb flash drive for about $150, but 32 Mb is more than twice the price. The article speculates that there will be demand soon for huge flash drives on high-performance servers. Wouldn't it make more sense to accomplish the same thing with a hybrid drive that has both a platter and flash inside? It seems more likely that flash-only will continue to be adopted on laptops like OLPC, or maybe for low-end servers as a way of saving electricity.
Would it be too much trouble for the submitter to explain what the acronym HDMI stands for, or at least to link to the WP article? Even after reading the WP article, I don't really know much about it.
Since it's a device for imposing DRM, there's presumably some mechanism for forcing the user to buy and use it. What is the mechanism? What types of equipment require it? The closest the WP article comes to discussing it seems to be this: "Both introduced in 2006, Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD offer new high-fidelity audio features that require HDMI for best results." Well, I'm still in the dark. What does "best results" mean? What are your results like if you don't use it?
Another thing I don't understand is how they think this kind of hardware-based DRM can work. All it takes is one hardware hacker to figure out how to tap in to some unencrypted signals, e.g., by connecting onto circuit boards. Once there's a single device that can be hacked by a publicly known procedure, every DRM'd movie out there can be transcoded into a non-DRM'd format.
One interesting sentence from the WP article: "PCs with hardware HDMI output may require software support from Operating Systems such as Windows Vista."
So does this mean that you can't use the technology on a Mac, for example? I'm also curious whether any manufacturers are actually making mobos or video cards with hdmi connectors on them.
And how does this fit in with the apparently overwhelming recent trend away from DRM in music? Is it really believable that movies will go the other way?
It is unfortunate, though, that there doesn't seem to be a good replacement for physical liner notes. I'm currently about half way through the process of converting my music collection from the last 25 years from LP and CD into mp3. I'm looking forward to getting rid of the hassles associated with physically managing all those physical objects. (Some of the LPs came in my car with me from Berkeley to New Haven in 1988, then to Chicago in 1994, and LA in 1996.) As I finish putting each album onto the computer, I'm packing up the original LP or CD and putting it in a box, where it will serve as a backup, and I will probably never need that backup, so I will probably never bother looking at it again. The unfortunate thing is that there's really no substitute for the cover art and liner notes. For example, I just finished with a 1955 jazz record, Diz and Getz. I bought it on CD in the 90's, and it came with a reformatted copy of the original 1955 liner notes, which tell me, for example, that the band has Oscar Peterson on piano and Max Roach on drums (ow!). There's Gracenote, but they're an evil proprietary remake of CDDB, and I don't want to have much to do with them, and in any case all they have is a little thumbnail of the cover and a list of tracks, no liner notes. Freedb is free-as-in-speech, but has even less than Gracenote.
There are much cheaper ways to get heat in the apartment than by running electricity through a resistor, such as a heat pump, or if you're in a really cold area, burning natural gas.
Depends on where you live. My grandmother lives in a fairly cold area (snows one a year or so), and natural gas isn't available there. I live in Southern California, and have gas heat, but my electricity comes from photovoltaics on the roof.
The Netflix advantage is that they have a larger catalog of content and they are actually willing to distribute it.
Yep. I was just visiting some relatives in Diamond Springs, Ca. The Diamond Springs post office used to have one slot for local mail, and one for mail that was going outside the local area. Now they've changed the local slot into one that's dedicated solely to Netflix envelopes. In rural areas, watching videos is a big deal, because there's not much else to do, and it doesn't take long to get to the point where you've watched everything at Blockbuster you have any interest in watching. My sister happens to work at a Hollywood Video in that area, and the corporation is going through chapter 11 bankruptcy -- you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out why.
Re:Standardize RTF first
on
RTF Vs. OOXML
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, I think the article is a little off base about RTF. It's not IP-encumbered.
As you pointed out, you can download the spec from MS. There's a ton of OSS implementations. There are perl modules that read and write it.
There's an O'Reilly book on it (free short version of it here).
Okay, so RTF changes when a new version of Word comes out. That means that, e.g., it shouldn't be used for archiving government documents, and it's not suitable as a universal format for people to collaborate on extremely complex documents using different software. It doesn't mean RTF is useless or evil. I write fiction, and RTF turns out to be a very useful lingua franca for magazines that accept electronic submissions. For a fiction manuscript, you don't need anything very fancy --- basically just the ability to underline, and put a header on each page. RTF works just fine for that, and I'm really, really glad that RTF is the de facto standard for this purpose, and not doc.
It's unfortunate that OOo's RTF support is so horrible. E.g., if you save a document from OOo in RTF format, open it, edit it again, and save it again, you lose the whole document. Yeesh!
Exactly my experience. gOS was a botch, so I installed vanilla Ubunto over it. My daughter is now happily running Gnome, OOo, and Firefox on her Everex box.
The 200$ PC is a via C7 processor. I have one, it can barely run a desktop in linux. the C7 processor is best suited for very thin client applications or non-display terminal type services such as a firewall or a slow file server.
I have one, and it runs Gnome, Firefox, and OpenOffice just fine.
Having used both Ubuntu and gOS, I'd maintain that Ubuntu is far easier to use than gOS, simply because gOS is insanely buggy at this point. It baffles me that they decided to go with their own flaky Enlightenment-based desktop. It's hard enough selling Linux to the masses, so why introduce their own alpha-quality software into the mix?
As far as Gnome's usability versus Windows's usability, I teach community college physics labs in a room with a mix of Ubuntu and Windows machines. My students don't seem to have any problems with Gnome. Some of them don't even realize it's not Windows. There are serious usability problems when they try to make graphs with OpenOffice; some of these are problems specific to OOo, and others are just copies of bad design choices in MS Office.
I think PC Magazine was assuming this was going to be a general purpose PC. It's not. It's a web terminal -- a PC that's sole purpose is to go online and let the user surf the net in relative safety.
I'm the author of the earlier review linked to from the/. summary. It's true that Everex is marketing the machine as a web terminal, not a general-purpose computer. However, it is a perfectly good general-purpose computer. OpenOffice performs fine, for example. The PC Magazine reviewer is an idiot, because he thinks "it doesn't run Windows or Mac software" equates to "it doesn't run any software." But in a way his idiocy is excusable, because Everex's documentation never explains a single thing about the existence of OSS beyond the preinstalled apps, and it doesn't tell you how to run apt or synaptic. Anyway, my daughter is using the thing as a general-purpose PC now (with standard Ubuntu, not gOS), and it's perfectly OK. IMO the problems with the machine are all problems with (a) the rough edges on gOS, and (b) the horrible documentation (almost complete lack of documentation) for gOS.
A UI based in JavaScript or even pure HTML is horridly inefficient.
Yeah, I gave the google apps a test drive last week, and although the word processor seemed fine on my (relatively recent) hardware, the spreadsheet was just pathetically slow. All that could change, though, when the Tamarin JIT compiler for javascript gets incorporated into Firefox.
No, it's not just you. The/. summary seems to bear little resemblance to the actual article. There's also no mention of the pricing or availability of the SSD, but from a quick check on frys.com, it looks like it's not available yet, what is available is 32 Gb sizes, and 32 Gb sizes will set you back about $350.
Re the magnetic test, one thing to watch out for is that a lot of metal things you buy are actually alloys, and since paramagnetism and diamagnetism are generally orders of magnitude weaker than ferromagnetism, the dominant effect may be ferromagnetism from any ferromagnetic materials in the alloy. There may also be ferromagnetic parts (screws,...) in an object that's mainly titanium. An example of this is that you can attract a piece of pencil lead detectably with a strong neodymium magnet, but I believe pure graphite is actually diamagnetic, so it would be (weakly) repelled by a magnet; the attraction is probably due to ferromagnetic or paramagnetic contaminants in the graphite. There may be a similar problem with the density test; you may have a hard time measuring the density of the titanium parts independently from the density of whatever other non-titanium parts are included or alloyed.
Slashdot Mirror
Since I turned off automatic Windows updates I rarely worry about shutting down and rebooting.
I hope it has really good power management, because otherwise that's an extreme waste of energy.
It's funny how many slashdotters are posting to say that Windows sucks and boots slow, and of course the solution is to run Linux. I run Linux, but one of the things I'm least happy about is the horrible support for power management. None of the sleep, hibernate, etc., options work on my machine at all. I don't know the solution to the problem, either, because it sounds like the problem is basically that manufacturers refuse to openly document the registers that need to be saved when their devices go to sleep. If I had working power management, then I wouldn't need to shut down my computer so often, and I wouldn't care much what my boot times were. This is all much bigger issue on laptops, of course.
I believe one of the reasons Linux doesn't boot faster than it does is that there's a kernel feature that, for security, randomizes the addresses at which various code is loaded into memory each time you boot. This is supposed to protect against buffer overflows that jump to a fixed address in memory. The problem is that it means you can't speed up booting by simply caching an image of the initialized state of a lot of your memory in a freshly booted system.
I don't know about other people's Linux boxes, but on mine the time taken to start Gnome is comparable to the time it takes to boot into gdm. That's one of the reasons I run fluxbox rather then Gnome.
Today, there's no excuse for not encrypting your email.
I've got a good excuse: none of the people I send email to are interested in installing decryption software so that they can read the messages I send them.
The audiobox article discusses phase encoding, which is what you're talking about.
In addition to the points made by the other posts above, I want to point out that for many applications you probably want to use a solid state drive anyway. My NSLU2 has a 16 Gb flash drive as its storage ($150), and that's big enough to hold my whole music collection in mp3 format. The flash drive is more compact than a spinning platter, and uses less power.
I suspect you spent something like $200, and got a system that takes up a lot of space and draws at least 50 watts. For under $100, you could buy an NSLU2, which draws 4 watts and is the size of a papeback book.
I have an NSLU2, and am very happy with it. Some reasons to prefer it over something like the KPC: it's less than half the price, it only draws 4 watts, and it's the size of a paperback book. I think it's important to understand what "slow" means in the parent post. It doesn't mean that it's slow as a file server, it means that it's got a slow cpu. Serving up files is not a cpu-intensive job, so the slow cpu has no impact of file-serving performance. I'm using it as a music server, and decoding an mp3 only uses about 1% of its cpu power.
A lot of people, including me, are using an NSLU2 for that. Cisco officially says it's OK with them if people modify the firmware, install Debian on it, etc. The price is under $100, and it only draws 4 watts, so it's a much better choice than a general-purpose computer for an always-on machine.
The article linked to from the slashdot article was missing some info, such as what linux distro it will have preinstalled. This one says it will be Ubuntu. All I could find on shuttle's own site was this press release.
It's good to see Tandy/Radio Shack represented on the list, but I think they should have included the TRS-80 Model I. It had horrible keyboard bounce: practically any time you hit a key, it would produce the same character multiple times on the screen. You could buy aftermarket software that tried to get rid of the effect. Also, although this is not strictly a keyboard issue, the character generator could only produce uppercase on the screen, reportedly saving Radio Shack 35 cents on every machine produced. A lot of the early-model TRS-80's also had bimetallic connections between the components, so the connectors would corrode rapidly. Every few weeks, you had to rub off the corrosion with a pencil eraser.
And yet we are judged by twelve people who could not escape jury duty.
Please think before propagating this meme, which is scornful and dismissive toward people who are trying to do their civic duty. People have been fighting and dying since 1215 AD to get the right to trial by jury. We're lucky to have it. When you say this, here's how it comes off: (1) you think you're way smarter than your peers; (2) you want to weasel out of jury duty; and (3) you want to complain that if you're involved in a jury trial, the people who (unlike you) actually do their duty are too dumb, so you're afraid you won't be happy with their verdict.
Most people think the magnification of a telescope is the most important number, whereas astronomers are typically more interested in the light-gathering power, as measured by the aperture. What's really being increased by a factor of 90 is neither the magnification nor the sensitivity, it's apparently the product of the sensitivity and the area of the field of view. The argument seems to be that this is an important figure of merit if you're doing a survey of faint objects, such as very distant galaxies.
...move along. No price, no specific release date, not yet in beta, no evidence that they actually have working hardware.
The sweet spot right now seems to be around 16 or 32 Mb. You can get an 16 Mb flash drive for about $150, but 32 Mb is more than twice the price. The article speculates that there will be demand soon for huge flash drives on high-performance servers. Wouldn't it make more sense to accomplish the same thing with a hybrid drive that has both a platter and flash inside? It seems more likely that flash-only will continue to be adopted on laptops like OLPC, or maybe for low-end servers as a way of saving electricity.
Would it be too much trouble for the submitter to explain what the acronym HDMI stands for, or at least to link to the WP article? Even after reading the WP article, I don't really know much about it.
Since it's a device for imposing DRM, there's presumably some mechanism for forcing the user to buy and use it. What is the mechanism? What types of equipment require it? The closest the WP article comes to discussing it seems to be this: "Both introduced in 2006, Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD offer new high-fidelity audio features that require HDMI for best results." Well, I'm still in the dark. What does "best results" mean? What are your results like if you don't use it?
Another thing I don't understand is how they think this kind of hardware-based DRM can work. All it takes is one hardware hacker to figure out how to tap in to some unencrypted signals, e.g., by connecting onto circuit boards. Once there's a single device that can be hacked by a publicly known procedure, every DRM'd movie out there can be transcoded into a non-DRM'd format.
One interesting sentence from the WP article: "PCs with hardware HDMI output may require software support from Operating Systems such as Windows Vista." So does this mean that you can't use the technology on a Mac, for example? I'm also curious whether any manufacturers are actually making mobos or video cards with hdmi connectors on them.
And how does this fit in with the apparently overwhelming recent trend away from DRM in music? Is it really believable that movies will go the other way?
It is unfortunate, though, that there doesn't seem to be a good replacement for physical liner notes. I'm currently about half way through the process of converting my music collection from the last 25 years from LP and CD into mp3. I'm looking forward to getting rid of the hassles associated with physically managing all those physical objects. (Some of the LPs came in my car with me from Berkeley to New Haven in 1988, then to Chicago in 1994, and LA in 1996.) As I finish putting each album onto the computer, I'm packing up the original LP or CD and putting it in a box, where it will serve as a backup, and I will probably never need that backup, so I will probably never bother looking at it again. The unfortunate thing is that there's really no substitute for the cover art and liner notes. For example, I just finished with a 1955 jazz record, Diz and Getz. I bought it on CD in the 90's, and it came with a reformatted copy of the original 1955 liner notes, which tell me, for example, that the band has Oscar Peterson on piano and Max Roach on drums (ow!). There's Gracenote, but they're an evil proprietary remake of CDDB, and I don't want to have much to do with them, and in any case all they have is a little thumbnail of the cover and a list of tracks, no liner notes. Freedb is free-as-in-speech, but has even less than Gracenote.
There are much cheaper ways to get heat in the apartment than by running electricity through a resistor, such as a heat pump, or if you're in a really cold area, burning natural gas.
Depends on where you live. My grandmother lives in a fairly cold area (snows one a year or so), and natural gas isn't available there. I live in Southern California, and have gas heat, but my electricity comes from photovoltaics on the roof.
The Netflix advantage is that they have a larger catalog of content and they are actually willing to distribute it.
Yep. I was just visiting some relatives in Diamond Springs, Ca. The Diamond Springs post office used to have one slot for local mail, and one for mail that was going outside the local area. Now they've changed the local slot into one that's dedicated solely to Netflix envelopes. In rural areas, watching videos is a big deal, because there's not much else to do, and it doesn't take long to get to the point where you've watched everything at Blockbuster you have any interest in watching. My sister happens to work at a Hollywood Video in that area, and the corporation is going through chapter 11 bankruptcy -- you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out why.
Yeah, I think the article is a little off base about RTF. It's not IP-encumbered. As you pointed out, you can download the spec from MS. There's a ton of OSS implementations. There are perl modules that read and write it. There's an O'Reilly book on it (free short version of it here).
Okay, so RTF changes when a new version of Word comes out. That means that, e.g., it shouldn't be used for archiving government documents, and it's not suitable as a universal format for people to collaborate on extremely complex documents using different software. It doesn't mean RTF is useless or evil. I write fiction, and RTF turns out to be a very useful lingua franca for magazines that accept electronic submissions. For a fiction manuscript, you don't need anything very fancy --- basically just the ability to underline, and put a header on each page. RTF works just fine for that, and I'm really, really glad that RTF is the de facto standard for this purpose, and not doc.
It's unfortunate that OOo's RTF support is so horrible. E.g., if you save a document from OOo in RTF format, open it, edit it again, and save it again, you lose the whole document. Yeesh!
Exactly my experience. gOS was a botch, so I installed vanilla Ubunto over it. My daughter is now happily running Gnome, OOo, and Firefox on her Everex box.
The 200$ PC is a via C7 processor. I have one, it can barely run a desktop in linux. the C7 processor is best suited for very thin client applications or non-display terminal type services such as a firewall or a slow file server.
I have one, and it runs Gnome, Firefox, and OpenOffice just fine.
Having used both Ubuntu and gOS, I'd maintain that Ubuntu is far easier to use than gOS, simply because gOS is insanely buggy at this point. It baffles me that they decided to go with their own flaky Enlightenment-based desktop. It's hard enough selling Linux to the masses, so why introduce their own alpha-quality software into the mix?
As far as Gnome's usability versus Windows's usability, I teach community college physics labs in a room with a mix of Ubuntu and Windows machines. My students don't seem to have any problems with Gnome. Some of them don't even realize it's not Windows. There are serious usability problems when they try to make graphs with OpenOffice; some of these are problems specific to OOo, and others are just copies of bad design choices in MS Office.
I think PC Magazine was assuming this was going to be a general purpose PC. It's not. It's a web terminal -- a PC that's sole purpose is to go online and let the user surf the net in relative safety. /. summary. It's true that Everex is marketing the machine as a web terminal, not a general-purpose computer. However, it is a perfectly good general-purpose computer. OpenOffice performs fine, for example. The PC Magazine reviewer is an idiot, because he thinks "it doesn't run Windows or Mac software" equates to "it doesn't run any software." But in a way his idiocy is excusable, because Everex's documentation never explains a single thing about the existence of OSS beyond the preinstalled apps, and it doesn't tell you how to run apt or synaptic. Anyway, my daughter is using the thing as a general-purpose PC now (with standard Ubuntu, not gOS), and it's perfectly OK. IMO the problems with the machine are all problems with (a) the rough edges on gOS, and (b) the horrible documentation (almost complete lack of documentation) for gOS.
I'm the author of the earlier review linked to from the
A UI based in JavaScript or even pure HTML is horridly inefficient.
Yeah, I gave the google apps a test drive last week, and although the word processor seemed fine on my (relatively recent) hardware, the spreadsheet was just pathetically slow. All that could change, though, when the Tamarin JIT compiler for javascript gets incorporated into Firefox.
No, it's not just you. The /. summary seems to bear little resemblance to the actual article. There's also no mention of the pricing or availability of the SSD, but from a quick check on frys.com, it looks like it's not available yet, what is available is 32 Gb sizes, and 32 Gb sizes will set you back about $350.
Re the magnetic test, one thing to watch out for is that a lot of metal things you buy are actually alloys, and since paramagnetism and diamagnetism are generally orders of magnitude weaker than ferromagnetism, the dominant effect may be ferromagnetism from any ferromagnetic materials in the alloy. There may also be ferromagnetic parts (screws, ...) in an object that's mainly titanium. An example of this is that you can attract a piece of pencil lead detectably with a strong neodymium magnet, but I believe pure graphite is actually diamagnetic, so it would be (weakly) repelled by a magnet; the attraction is probably due to ferromagnetic or paramagnetic contaminants in the graphite. There may be a similar problem with the density test; you may have a hard time measuring the density of the titanium parts independently from the density of whatever other non-titanium parts are included or alloyed.