The first thing that popped into my head seeing this is whether or not it supports PictBridge. If so, they may be able to push it to professional photographers who are having to lug around a notebook as things stand right now. As much photostorage as a notebook but fits in your pocket while still providing a way to check what you've got stored? I could see how that would be appealing to someone with a DSLR camera.
(Remember those videos of the Athlon blowing up if the heatsink fell off?)
You mean before the Athlon had any thermal throttling measures whatsoever? That was the whole point of that video - the P3 would cut off, the P4 would throttle, and the Athlon would just plain burn up.
That video was highly influential in getting AMD to make a thermal cutoff a requirement for a motherboard to be AMD certified. The newer Athlon 64s have thermal throttling circuitry similar to the P4's, as I understand it.
Basically, you completely misinterpreted the video in question. The Athlon burned up because there wasn't any auto-throttling to fail; the Intel solutions performed exactly as they were designed to.
The extremely odd part of this is the fact that the computer was running when then happened - it didn't occur during a power up. I came home one night, shook the mouse the bring the computer out of standby and nothing came up on screen. Needless to say, I immediately saw what the problem was when I pulled the card.
The really crappy part of it was, the card was literally 6 days over a year old when this happened, and Power Color refused to replace it. Last of their cards I'll be buying. Ah well, I'd been wanting one of those sweet new 6600GTs anyway, I was just hoping I'd be able to sell this card first to negate part of the cost. Such is life.
So because you personally were uneffected, the problem doesn't exist? I only mentioned Call of Duty because the problems were so widespread, I know I was affected by it and it was almost 2 months after the release of the game before I was able to play the game driver crash-free.
And if you want to talk about the red-headed step children of ATI driver development, talk to people with AIW cards. I've heard of driver updates completely breaking a game on AIW cards more than once. So no, driver problems aren't uniform for ATI, but they're still very common.
ATI's drivers are certainly better than they were in 1999, but they are nowhere near nVidia's. What about the Call of Duty issue that made the game unplayable until a new driver release for many ATI owners? The nasty rendering bugs in DX:IW that were driver related and took *two* driver updates to fix? Or any number of other issues that took game-specific tweaks to fix.
While I liked my 9600 Pro (which is, incidently the only card I've ever seen a component actually catch fire on - I have pictures if you need proof), drivers were certainly an issue. While it was quick, in the end I wish I'd gone with an nVidia solution just because it'd have been less headache. As it is, I'm making do with my old Ti4200 until I can afford to upgrade to PCIe and a 6600GT.
One of the biggest issues with changes in Episode IV has always been the "Han shoots first", which in the origional he did, in fact, in the origional, he is the only one to shoot. But in 1977, there was no movie ratings, but now we do have them. Because of this, if Han still did shoot first, the movie would have been rated R for "graphic violence and adult content" (murder). But with having Han shot at, it becomes clear self defence and is just "graphic violence".
Absolutely and totally incorrect. In fact, if anything, there's been speculation that the shot of the burning bodies of Luke's aunt and uncle was added to film specifically to avoid receiving a G rating, which it was felt would hurt the movie at the box office.
I'm not the parent poster, but I feel compelled to reply.
The difference is, in your example, the same amount of effort and time must be expended for each pie, apple, whatever created. So if you were to steal that physical item, you're depriving the owner of the time and effort involved in the creation of that individual item.
The difference when it comes to software is that the effort is only expended one, and from that point, an infinite number of copies can be created - all from the one initial amount of effort expended in the creation of the first copy. So while you're breaking the copyright law, the owner hasn't directly lost anything as they would with a more traditional item.
This isn't to say that piracy is right, far from it, but there's definitely a distinction between piracy and traditional theft.
You mean the Noconas that RedHat had to essentially hack a special software paging mode into the kernel for over 4GB of memory for? The ones that didn't implement the NX bit? The ones that, for the most part, just plain wouldn't run stock x86-64 binaries that run perfectly on Opteron?
Could you explain this to me, because I'm missing the point you're trying to make. The HIG is designed to provide a consistent interface, specifically so the user doesn't have to guess about what they need to do next. All config tools are cleanly filed under System Tools or Desktop Preferences in Gnome, all clearly labeled as to what they do. If a tool is properly following the HIG, it should be consistent in layout with any other config tool. I guess what I'm trying to say is I fail to see where this is "Gnome's fault."
Heh, I noticed the same thing, and while it is amusing in a way, I'd also like the thank Bruce for doing so. Instead of lots of conjecture or half explanations, we're getting clear, thought out explanations directly from the source.
This tends to happen on Slashdot anyway (John Carmack in particular comes to mind) but seeing Bruce's name in just about every thread on this topic was impressive and I for one appreciate it. Thanks.:-)
That's the game source code, which is a bit different. That's the part that say this gun does this much damage, etc. It sits on top of the engine, and is the part you'd use to create mods.
The engine source code handles the rendering, physics, etc. That's the part that Carmack was talking about hopefully having open sourced by the end of the year.
I'll have to second this. Debian is absolutely horrible IMO about wanting to do everything the "Debian way". Config files are stuck where Debian wants them, special Debian config tools, etc. This is fine if you're only running GNU software that can be installed via apt-get, but I'd never consider Debian for a production environment. If I were to push any non-standard distro, it'd be Slackware simply because it just works 90% of the time - everything is standard and everything is as basic as possible. Through in an update manager like Swaret and you're set.
That said, if I was using a commercial app and getting support relied on RH or SuSE, I'd be running RH or SuSE. Both are fine distributions, and being able to call support without being fed a "I'm sorry, we don't support your software environment" is worth it.
So you can like Debian all you want, but for your company's purpose, you'd be doing them a disservice by migrating them away from the distribution(s) supported by your software vendor.
So all this 'old' technology, subject of so many stupid 'death of' articles, is actually new to people who don't have the money to buy new computers every 18-month Moore's cycle. Everyone in the tech community is excited that the PCs are spreading throughout segments of society who have never experienced the joys of interactive machines before, then they insult this new group with articles that the PC technology that is new to them is 'obsolete' and 'dead'.
So what happens when all the people who are using these old PCs (that are several generations prior to current) store all their valuable work on the floppy technology that is available to them and find that a few years later they can't retrieve it? Will they get hit with a huge bill to retrieve their data from 'obsolete' media formats?
Which is precisely the reason why I tell people *NOT* to put anything of any real value on a floppy. Hard drive for primary storage, CDs, USB keydrive, or online disk space for backup. Personally, with the quality of the disks these days, I think you'd be a fool to store anything of importance on floppy anyway - the failure rates are attrocious.
Basically we're telling people who are new to computers, 'hey, here is all this great free computer stuff that works fine but is just not brand new. Check it out. Then when you fill all the storage media with your important data such as letters, journals, and photos, we'll charge you a ton of money to get it off of the media that we gave to you for free (because we made it obsolete).'
Everyone will just start to think of the tech community as just a gaggle of cheap sleezy hustlers.
I don't even know where to start with this one. So wanting to deprecate an obsolete format is just a scheme to make money off data recovery? Again, the solution is simple, direct users away from floppy use as much as possible. They'll be better off from it anyway.
Behind this scenario is the reality that millions of floppy disks are being used by small and medium-sized companies for long-term corporate storage of business records of the years 1985 to 2000. People are just assuming that someone else is transfering and maintaining these records but that is often not true in smaller businesses. Without floppy drives, these records will disappear because they can't be read.
This is the first legit argument in your post. The problem is, there's a good chance that the media would degrade simply from sitting on the shelf in that type of time period - the records may be lost anyway, so the sooner they're transferred the better.
The tech community must wake up to the realization that any new storage medium that can't read the data from a previous storage medium is not an advance, but a step backward.
Basically, your entire post is an argument for everyone holding onto an old format with better replacements because *somebody* *somewhere* might need it. Let's face it, the only reason most people think they need a floppy drive in a new computer is because it's there. There are viable replacements out there, use them. There's absolutely no need for every commodity computer out there to ship with a floppy drive that will generally go unused. Should we still be running leaded gas in our cars? Somebody somewhere might still need it.
My year and a half old Biostar NForce2 board supports both USB and Firewire boot devices. The super cheap ASRock boards we use at work (we're talking like $35-40 here) support at least a dozen different boot devices including USB HDD, USB CD, USB Mass Storage, etc.
If boards that cheap have it, I'd almost have to believe you'd have to be going out of your way to find ones that don't.
You left out the one thing I feel is most important and most often overlooked - reliability. Floppies are a notoriously unreliable medium, and USB keydrive have been found to be incredibly robust. For that reason alone, it's worth abandoning the floppy in favor of the USB keydrive.
What happens when you have an important doc on a floppy disk, get to a job/school and need to use it, only to find out that a few sectors are corrupt and the disk is unreadable? This is my main issue with floppies and why I started refusing to use them unless absolutely forced to after CD-RW drives became a viable option, and why I'm such a proponent of USB drives now.
You chances of losing data with a floppy disk with it never leaving your possession are higher than the chances of my losing my USB keydrive, along with all my keys.
Most new computers these days do have front USB ports, my solution for the ones that don't has simply been a USB extension cable. If you're using equipment that doesn't have USB at all, you're likely talking about machines that are at least 5 years old, and I'd personally say that doesn't qualify as mainstream.
As far as being unable to boot to USB keys, you're again mistaken. Every modern chipset that I've worked with for at least a year and a half supports boot from USB. NF2 chipsets generally support booting from Firewire devices as well. Given that NF2 is a 2 year old chipset, and wasn't the first to do it, you're again talking about older equipment.
The only reason the floppy will continue to hold any longer than it has are people that have it in their head that they "need" the medium, however slow, lacking in storage, or unreliable it may be.
Umm I don't know which dream world you're living in, but going to 64 bit isn't going to magically cause an add to take up 5 fewer clock cycles.
As you pointed out yourself, most processes will not benefit in any way from going to a 64 bit word length. The catch here is, that since a 64 bit value is twice the length of a 32 bit variable, you can fit less information overall in the CPU's cache. Meaning that cache misses become both more common, since fewer values can be stored, and more costly since more data has to be swapped out in the process.
So I seriously doubt any form of optimization is going to yield "40-100%" gains in speed merely by going to 64 bit for a general purpose operating system. That is unless you honestly believe you're smarter than the people Apple, Sun, and everyone else in the field has working for them on this issue, in which case, I'm sure they'd love to talk to you.
I'm sorry, but that's simply wrong. Tiger will be 64 *capable*, but I'd wager that the majority of the OS and your binaries will likely still run in 32 bit mode by default, precisely because it's faster than 64 bit mode. So what the G5 is capable of today is pretty much the same thing that it will be capable of after the release of Tiger for this type of application. The OS running in 32 bit mode is not the bottleneck. You can't say that for K8.
The reason for this is that the PowerPC architechture works in essentially the same manner outside of word size in both 32 bit and 64 bit modes. This means the chip handles everything in the same manner in both modes, but 64 bit mode requires moving more data, which takes up more bandwidth and memory. Sun CPUs and OS have been 64 bit for years, but much of the software on that platform is 32 bit as it doesn't need 64 bitness, so running in 32 bit mode is more efficient. Same thing will happen with Apple and the G5.
The difference with x86-64 is the fact that x86-64 is a reworking of the old x86 architechture. While based on it, and capable of running x86 software, it works to fix some of the biggest problems that have plagued the architechture for years now. Register starvation is the most common exampe, and it's one that x86-64 goes a long way toward solving.
Because of this, many people have come to assume that 64 bit means faster, but this is really only the case with x86-64. On most of the RISC platforms out there today, it's actually slightly detrimental. On these types of platforms, including the PowerPC, the biggest advantage is an extended native addressing space.
But the G5 is pound-for-pound faster than the PC chips out today.
Pure conjecture. As someone who's fairly platform agnostic, I'll admit that I love the G5 and feel that it's an excellent chip architechture, but I've gotten the distinct impression that it's about equal with the Opteron/Athlon64 line, clock for clock. It eats a P4 for breakfast in this domain, no doubt, but everyone is well aware of the P4/Netburst's extremely poor IPC.
The big advantage right now is that a G5 can run software at its full potential *now*, whereas an Athlon64 is currently relegated to 32 bit mode (we're talking gaming, and therefore I assume Windows. For other applications you most certainly have 64bit Linux). The Athlon64 will only get faster as x86-64 software begins showing up, opening up the extra registers on the CPU that currently go unused.
So I guess my point is, yes, the G5 is an amazing chip and a huge step forward for Apple, but don't believe that it's something that it isn't. This of course all comes with the usual disclaimer that it's all about your application, so pick the best in that regard.
I've run into this same problem myself. My father still runs his system on a DOS based POS solution simply because I've been completely unable to find a suitable OSS replacement.
All I was looking for was a simple, NCurses based interface - a POS does not need X and the added overhead and boot time associated with it. I keep checking every few months, but there never seems to be anything worth the effort of migrating to. I've seriously considered picking up PostgreSQL myself to try to implement something as it seems like there's nothing coming out of the community right now.
You're probably having a hard time finding it as it was shown to be a hoax. While some of the pictures were interesting, the story to go with it should be taken with a huge grain of salt.
Your taste in keyboards sounds very similar to mine.
This was the cheapest keyboard I found that met those criteria: http://www.newegg.com/app/viewproductde sc.asp?desc ription=23-144-014&DEPA=1
My only real complaint about it is the stupid power management keys pushing scroll lock, etc down a bit, but you get used to it after a while, and it actually makes hitting scroll lock to switch my KVM a bit easier.
That said, my favorite keyboard in the entire world is actually a Cherry. Has the greatest tactile feel to it and a perfect layout. Unfortunately, it also has a 4 Port USB hub and acts up when plugged into a KVM.
See, my experience with Gnome is the exact opposite - I love Gnome because everything I regularly need is within a click or two, without creating clutter. It's kind of interesting because as a rule, I'm a very cluttered person. My room is nothing short of a disaster, but thanks to things like drawers (which I feel are a hugely underappreciated feature of Gnome), my computer workspace doesn't have to be. Like you said, to each his own.:-)
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The first thing that popped into my head seeing this is whether or not it supports PictBridge. If so, they may be able to push it to professional photographers who are having to lug around a notebook as things stand right now. As much photostorage as a notebook but fits in your pocket while still providing a way to check what you've got stored? I could see how that would be appealing to someone with a DSLR camera.
You mean before the Athlon had any thermal throttling measures whatsoever? That was the whole point of that video - the P3 would cut off, the P4 would throttle, and the Athlon would just plain burn up.
That video was highly influential in getting AMD to make a thermal cutoff a requirement for a motherboard to be AMD certified. The newer Athlon 64s have thermal throttling circuitry similar to the P4's, as I understand it.
Basically, you completely misinterpreted the video in question. The Athlon burned up because there wasn't any auto-throttling to fail; the Intel solutions performed exactly as they were designed to.
Wide shot of the card
A close up of the damage done
The extremely odd part of this is the fact that the computer was running when then happened - it didn't occur during a power up. I came home one night, shook the mouse the bring the computer out of standby and nothing came up on screen. Needless to say, I immediately saw what the problem was when I pulled the card.
The really crappy part of it was, the card was literally 6 days over a year old when this happened, and Power Color refused to replace it. Last of their cards I'll be buying. Ah well, I'd been wanting one of those sweet new 6600GTs anyway, I was just hoping I'd be able to sell this card first to negate part of the cost. Such is life.
So because you personally were uneffected, the problem doesn't exist? I only mentioned Call of Duty because the problems were so widespread, I know I was affected by it and it was almost 2 months after the release of the game before I was able to play the game driver crash-free.
And if you want to talk about the red-headed step children of ATI driver development, talk to people with AIW cards. I've heard of driver updates completely breaking a game on AIW cards more than once. So no, driver problems aren't uniform for ATI, but they're still very common.
ATI's drivers are certainly better than they were in 1999, but they are nowhere near nVidia's. What about the Call of Duty issue that made the game unplayable until a new driver release for many ATI owners? The nasty rendering bugs in DX:IW that were driver related and took *two* driver updates to fix? Or any number of other issues that took game-specific tweaks to fix.
While I liked my 9600 Pro (which is, incidently the only card I've ever seen a component actually catch fire on - I have pictures if you need proof), drivers were certainly an issue. While it was quick, in the end I wish I'd gone with an nVidia solution just because it'd have been less headache. As it is, I'm making do with my old Ti4200 until I can afford to upgrade to PCIe and a 6600GT.
Just as an FYI, the 1.4GHz Thunderbird was one of, if not *the* hottest chip AMD has ever made, so it's a bit more than a "vanilla" Athlon. :-)
Absolutely and totally incorrect. In fact, if anything, there's been speculation that the shot of the burning bodies of Luke's aunt and uncle was added to film specifically to avoid receiving a G rating, which it was felt would hurt the movie at the box office.
I'm not the parent poster, but I feel compelled to reply.
The difference is, in your example, the same amount of effort and time must be expended for each pie, apple, whatever created. So if you were to steal that physical item, you're depriving the owner of the time and effort involved in the creation of that individual item.
The difference when it comes to software is that the effort is only expended one, and from that point, an infinite number of copies can be created - all from the one initial amount of effort expended in the creation of the first copy. So while you're breaking the copyright law, the owner hasn't directly lost anything as they would with a more traditional item.
This isn't to say that piracy is right, far from it, but there's definitely a distinction between piracy and traditional theft.
You mean the Noconas that RedHat had to essentially hack a special software paging mode into the kernel for over 4GB of memory for? The ones that didn't implement the NX bit? The ones that, for the most part, just plain wouldn't run stock x86-64 binaries that run perfectly on Opteron?
Yeah, Intel's staying on top of the game alright.
Could you explain this to me, because I'm missing the point you're trying to make. The HIG is designed to provide a consistent interface, specifically so the user doesn't have to guess about what they need to do next. All config tools are cleanly filed under System Tools or Desktop Preferences in Gnome, all clearly labeled as to what they do. If a tool is properly following the HIG, it should be consistent in layout with any other config tool. I guess what I'm trying to say is I fail to see where this is "Gnome's fault."
Heh, I noticed the same thing, and while it is amusing in a way, I'd also like the thank Bruce for doing so. Instead of lots of conjecture or half explanations, we're getting clear, thought out explanations directly from the source.
:-)
This tends to happen on Slashdot anyway (John Carmack in particular comes to mind) but seeing Bruce's name in just about every thread on this topic was impressive and I for one appreciate it. Thanks.
That's the game source code, which is a bit different. That's the part that say this gun does this much damage, etc. It sits on top of the engine, and is the part you'd use to create mods.
The engine source code handles the rendering, physics, etc. That's the part that Carmack was talking about hopefully having open sourced by the end of the year.
I'll have to second this. Debian is absolutely horrible IMO about wanting to do everything the "Debian way". Config files are stuck where Debian wants them, special Debian config tools, etc. This is fine if you're only running GNU software that can be installed via apt-get, but I'd never consider Debian for a production environment. If I were to push any non-standard distro, it'd be Slackware simply because it just works 90% of the time - everything is standard and everything is as basic as possible. Through in an update manager like Swaret and you're set.
That said, if I was using a commercial app and getting support relied on RH or SuSE, I'd be running RH or SuSE. Both are fine distributions, and being able to call support without being fed a "I'm sorry, we don't support your software environment" is worth it.
So you can like Debian all you want, but for your company's purpose, you'd be doing them a disservice by migrating them away from the distribution(s) supported by your software vendor.
Which is precisely the reason why I tell people *NOT* to put anything of any real value on a floppy. Hard drive for primary storage, CDs, USB keydrive, or online disk space for backup. Personally, with the quality of the disks these days, I think you'd be a fool to store anything of importance on floppy anyway - the failure rates are attrocious.
I don't even know where to start with this one. So wanting to deprecate an obsolete format is just a scheme to make money off data recovery? Again, the solution is simple, direct users away from floppy use as much as possible. They'll be better off from it anyway.
This is the first legit argument in your post. The problem is, there's a good chance that the media would degrade simply from sitting on the shelf in that type of time period - the records may be lost anyway, so the sooner they're transferred the better.
Basically, your entire post is an argument for everyone holding onto an old format with better replacements because *somebody* *somewhere* might need it. Let's face it, the only reason most people think they need a floppy drive in a new computer is because it's there. There are viable replacements out there, use them. There's absolutely no need for every commodity computer out there to ship with a floppy drive that will generally go unused. Should we still be running leaded gas in our cars? Somebody somewhere might still need it.
My year and a half old Biostar NForce2 board supports both USB and Firewire boot devices. The super cheap ASRock boards we use at work (we're talking like $35-40 here) support at least a dozen different boot devices including USB HDD, USB CD, USB Mass Storage, etc.
If boards that cheap have it, I'd almost have to believe you'd have to be going out of your way to find ones that don't.
You left out the one thing I feel is most important and most often overlooked - reliability. Floppies are a notoriously unreliable medium, and USB keydrive have been found to be incredibly robust. For that reason alone, it's worth abandoning the floppy in favor of the USB keydrive.
What happens when you have an important doc on a floppy disk, get to a job/school and need to use it, only to find out that a few sectors are corrupt and the disk is unreadable? This is my main issue with floppies and why I started refusing to use them unless absolutely forced to after CD-RW drives became a viable option, and why I'm such a proponent of USB drives now.
You chances of losing data with a floppy disk with it never leaving your possession are higher than the chances of my losing my USB keydrive, along with all my keys.
Most new computers these days do have front USB ports, my solution for the ones that don't has simply been a USB extension cable. If you're using equipment that doesn't have USB at all, you're likely talking about machines that are at least 5 years old, and I'd personally say that doesn't qualify as mainstream.
As far as being unable to boot to USB keys, you're again mistaken. Every modern chipset that I've worked with for at least a year and a half supports boot from USB. NF2 chipsets generally support booting from Firewire devices as well. Given that NF2 is a 2 year old chipset, and wasn't the first to do it, you're again talking about older equipment.
The only reason the floppy will continue to hold any longer than it has are people that have it in their head that they "need" the medium, however slow, lacking in storage, or unreliable it may be.
Umm I don't know which dream world you're living in, but going to 64 bit isn't going to magically cause an add to take up 5 fewer clock cycles.
As you pointed out yourself, most processes will not benefit in any way from going to a 64 bit word length. The catch here is, that since a 64 bit value is twice the length of a 32 bit variable, you can fit less information overall in the CPU's cache. Meaning that cache misses become both more common, since fewer values can be stored, and more costly since more data has to be swapped out in the process.
So I seriously doubt any form of optimization is going to yield "40-100%" gains in speed merely by going to 64 bit for a general purpose operating system. That is unless you honestly believe you're smarter than the people Apple, Sun, and everyone else in the field has working for them on this issue, in which case, I'm sure they'd love to talk to you.
I'm sorry, but that's simply wrong. Tiger will be 64 *capable*, but I'd wager that the majority of the OS and your binaries will likely still run in 32 bit mode by default, precisely because it's faster than 64 bit mode. So what the G5 is capable of today is pretty much the same thing that it will be capable of after the release of Tiger for this type of application. The OS running in 32 bit mode is not the bottleneck. You can't say that for K8.
The reason for this is that the PowerPC architechture works in essentially the same manner outside of word size in both 32 bit and 64 bit modes. This means the chip handles everything in the same manner in both modes, but 64 bit mode requires moving more data, which takes up more bandwidth and memory. Sun CPUs and OS have been 64 bit for years, but much of the software on that platform is 32 bit as it doesn't need 64 bitness, so running in 32 bit mode is more efficient. Same thing will happen with Apple and the G5.
The difference with x86-64 is the fact that x86-64 is a reworking of the old x86 architechture. While based on it, and capable of running x86 software, it works to fix some of the biggest problems that have plagued the architechture for years now. Register starvation is the most common exampe, and it's one that x86-64 goes a long way toward solving.
Because of this, many people have come to assume that 64 bit means faster, but this is really only the case with x86-64. On most of the RISC platforms out there today, it's actually slightly detrimental. On these types of platforms, including the PowerPC, the biggest advantage is an extended native addressing space.
Pure conjecture. As someone who's fairly platform agnostic, I'll admit that I love the G5 and feel that it's an excellent chip architechture, but I've gotten the distinct impression that it's about equal with the Opteron/Athlon64 line, clock for clock. It eats a P4 for breakfast in this domain, no doubt, but everyone is well aware of the P4/Netburst's extremely poor IPC.
The big advantage right now is that a G5 can run software at its full potential *now*, whereas an Athlon64 is currently relegated to 32 bit mode (we're talking gaming, and therefore I assume Windows. For other applications you most certainly have 64bit Linux). The Athlon64 will only get faster as x86-64 software begins showing up, opening up the extra registers on the CPU that currently go unused.
So I guess my point is, yes, the G5 is an amazing chip and a huge step forward for Apple, but don't believe that it's something that it isn't. This of course all comes with the usual disclaimer that it's all about your application, so pick the best in that regard.
I've run into this same problem myself. My father still runs his system on a DOS based POS solution simply because I've been completely unable to find a suitable OSS replacement.
All I was looking for was a simple, NCurses based interface - a POS does not need X and the added overhead and boot time associated with it. I keep checking every few months, but there never seems to be anything worth the effort of migrating to. I've seriously considered picking up PostgreSQL myself to try to implement something as it seems like there's nothing coming out of the community right now.
You're probably having a hard time finding it as it was shown to be a hoax. While some of the pictures were interesting, the story to go with it should be taken with a huge grain of salt.
Your taste in keyboards sounds very similar to mine.
e sc.asp?desc ription=23-144-014&DEPA=1
This was the cheapest keyboard I found that met those criteria:
http://www.newegg.com/app/viewproductd
My only real complaint about it is the stupid power management keys pushing scroll lock, etc down a bit, but you get used to it after a while, and it actually makes hitting scroll lock to switch my KVM a bit easier.
That said, my favorite keyboard in the entire world is actually a Cherry. Has the greatest tactile feel to it and a perfect layout. Unfortunately, it also has a 4 Port USB hub and acts up when plugged into a KVM.
See, my experience with Gnome is the exact opposite - I love Gnome because everything I regularly need is within a click or two, without creating clutter. It's kind of interesting because as a rule, I'm a very cluttered person. My room is nothing short of a disaster, but thanks to things like drawers (which I feel are a hugely underappreciated feature of Gnome), my computer workspace doesn't have to be. Like you said, to each his own. :-)