Getting slightly OT here, but... I have, and do. On netbsd, but that shouldn't have a difference. XFCE is significantly snappier than the full-blown Gnome desktop, or KDE, and it comes with all the goodies I've ever needed. Switch on the Platinum look, and we're almost back in the snap-click-happen MacOS 9 days (but everythink actually works now:)
Why, is something broken in -current, or something?
erm... so you expect me to be sufficient DRM? I hate to tell it to you man, but I've got a lousy ear for music. I'd probably be a quite lossy solution.
The parent has the right of it. What you describe is exactly the "no-frills" Slashdot phone. Something that is not so much a phone but a communication device. A nice bonus would be iSync support for the calendar. I'd certainly get one in a heartbeat in favor of my current Nokia flip-keyboard brick thingy with built-in Space Invaders.
The Nokia 11xx series phones are butt ugly and don't have bluetooth for things like tangle-free headsets. Otherwise they'd be fairly decent minimalist options.
Another Mail add-on would be to integrate PGP/GPG in a seamless, easy to use manner so that everyone and their grandma could use it, perhaps by default.
Check out GPGMail. It works seamlessly and really quite well - we use this at the office all the time.
Now a real killer app would be something to make the PGP infrastructure key management, authentication and authorization as easy as it is with X.509 (GPG Keychain Access is a start, but not a solution). Then people could use it by default, and we could start marking all non-signed (and some signed) mail automatically as spam.
Its probably a better time to start a debate about how we here in Europe can stop the Americans from erroding our existing privacy laws to suit themselves.
To note, I e-mailed my EU parliament rep about this issue while the talks were ongoing. She responded back the next day with a very thoughtful reply, and somehow a few days later my "at least" scenario came to be. It gave at least a nice illusion of working democracy.
Unfortunately most filesystems don't have a way of being told that a snapshot is being taken, and to checkpoint themselves.
FFS in *BSD has had snapshot support for some time. Although I never had problems restoring FFS's dump'd in the pre-snapshot days (and yes, I had to recover from a few complete RAID array blow-outs in very actual practice... flaky MegaRAID controllers, and whatnot... ugh).
dump(8) rules.
Also I have never quite understood the Linux XYZFS of the day. Sure, FFS ain't the latest and greatest, but it's quite darn robust and snappy enough for most practical uses, and basic stuff like restores work, and work reliably. So why no FFS in *nux?
Ditto. The other reason I prefer Safari is its better use of screen space. Firefox just has too much waste pixels.
The same reasons actually make me prefer Mail.app over thunderbird - with the added nuisance that tb doesn't deal gracefully with migrating between networks.
If you think BSD is the right way to go, then why do you even care about GPLv2 vs. GPLv3?
My concern is for the future of the FOSS movement; not for what bits of it I can use. I do agree with what you are saying, but it rather missed my point. (Well, at this hour, my lack of clarity of expression probably contributed somewhat:-)
Commercial ventures (well, successful ones anyways) will always asses what they have as applicable resources, and build from that. FOSS is a resource pool of increasing importance and usefulness. When FOSS is used, and it makes sense (it usually does), any subsequent development will be pushed back upstream, effectively contributing to FOSS. (And if the source was BSD-licensed, "any" can be "most", which makes it feasible to base also more hairy derivative works on - as was with my sample case which involved non-general-purpose proprietary hacks.) But if there is no usable FOSS component, then one will be implemented in-house and that's that. Practicality rules.
The FOSS applicable to any commercial venture is BSD based. Most GPLv2 stuff also qualifies for most ventures. GPLv3 stuff will not qualify for most ventures at all. Consequently the contributions from commercial organizations to FOSS will decrease in direct proportion to v3 adoption. Which, I think, will hurt FOSS overall. This is why I think GPLv3, as it is currently written, (and will be adopted by new FOSS writers by default,) will hurt FOSS more than help it.
Note that I am not saying GPLv3 is a bad license. I guess I am mostly wondering about the goals of it. In the grander scheme of things, it seems to me that the apparent downsides seriously outweigh the useful updates. But maybe that's just me and my cynicism...
I have participated in projects which involved patents and resulted in sellable products - and every single line of code (protocol stacks, device drivers, bug fixes etc) that was not crucial to the heart of the customized product were released as open source. It didn't make any sense not to. We always used BSD codebases, though, somewhat wary as to what mess GPLv2 might get us into. With GPLv3, GPL'd code would not even enter the consideration.
One must also remember that many FOSS authors automatically use GPL because it is "teh license", basically due to the publicity. Much in the same way people use GNU/Linux because it is "teh OS". This means that whatever becomes of the next GPL version, will be automatically used in many projects. Consequently GPLv3, as it now reads, would result in lessening participation and contributions from commercial organizations and many skilled individuals alike. I do not see it as a good thing for FOSS. IMHO, the Berkeley folks got it right ages ago.
Google is the default also in Safari, the Mac OS X default browser. I guess we could generalize that "I bet there is a correlation between the switcing rate from IE to *[xX]":-)
Yikes! I had to upgrade mine with a 1 GHz CPU and a Radeon 9800 before Doom 3 was playable, though:-P
On the other hand, I'm now running 10.4.8 on two 19" tfts, building pkgsrc-2006Q3 beside Safari on this screen, vlc playing the latest NCIS ep on the other, bittorrent downloading some anime beside it...
Every release of OSX, up to 10.4.3 or so, just kept running better and better on this rig. I haven't seen any significant speed-ups since, tho.
My upgrade path will probably be a 2004-ish dual-1,25 G4, when this machine expires. (Which may still take some years...)
That said, the US can't really complain too loudly if EU carriers stop giving them all the info they want now - it's clearly against EU privacy laws
Exactly. All you travelling EU citizens, make sure you let your EU representative know your - and your friends' and colleagues' - stance on the matter asap. (If they are worth their salt, their EU rep info page links to their web site or some such, which contains direct contact information. If it does not, then you know what to do in the next election, no?) I did. Laws are laws, and our privacy laws don't need any more eroding, especially over such lunacy.
Heck, let's go back to visas - then at least everyone will explicitly know what information they are handing over, and they do it in person. This is what we do with unstable or dubious countries, isn't it? It would also be better for "terrorist detection", wouldn't it? Should my business require a visit to the Other Side (unlikely in the current atmosphere), I don't see applying for a visa being much of an additional pain - and then at least I'd know exactly what data was given, to whom, when, and maybe even why (I have lost my mind).
It probably helps to be a Finn right now, so this applies especially to all of you Finns out there. There is a distinct, non-zero possibility that Tuomioja will actually get your message from a fellow countryperson rep, and it could have some influence on the actual negotiations. Let democracy work for you, by you, right now.
Of course, I am known as being an excessive optimist... but if you don't try, you'll definitely have no input on the matter.
There is an established way to do (roughly - without the detention) this - simply require a visa for entry, interview required at US embassy (effectively US soil, US procedures). It's even already established that airlines can be fined for bringing a passenger without the right visa.
Exactly. The solution to the current problem is to require visa. This way every citizen wishing to visit stateside will know what of their personal information has been given out - and they have signed it off themselves. This is exactly what the visa system is for.
As a citizen and a reasonably frequent flyer, I want to know which airlines did give out information last weekend. Those criminals will not be getting my money.
Friends and myself have moved most of our FreeBSD boxes to NetBSD. As FreeBSD has grown bulky and fat (like many linux distros), NetBSD was there to fall back on. NetBSD feels and acts like UNIX in a world where everyone wants to act like Windows.
I completely second this. I used to be a linux user until the late nineties, when I actually had to maintain a bunch of real-world servers, with some security considerations -- i.e. I needed to know what code our servers were actually running. What a horrible mess the Slackware installations suddenly were.
At that point I migrated our company to FreeBSD 4. Lately, due to the problems with FBSD 4 getting obsolete hardware-support-wise, and FBSD 5 not looking very promising, we've been steadily migrating to NetBSD 2 and then 3. Your summary is very apt for what I also have learned during this migration.
What I have been toying with in my head is to take the Linux kernel, mix-and-match a BSD-style quality-controlled "base distribution" from GNU tools and BSD userland, using the neat and compact rc.d system (who, ever, have you actually known to use runlevels other than 0, 1, 3 and 6?), fix the ages-old (smallish but annoying) linux brokenness (like ifconfig not having the -u flag, or not showing link status, or all kernel/driver boot-up messages being incoherent), and put pkgsrc on top. This approach would, in effect, provide us the best of both worlds...
The NetBSD kernel is an excellent study piece, being well made and well documented, but the Linux kernel is simply much more relevant. The NetBSD userland is superior to the pseudo-random GNU mess (where everyone's gotten their toy flags in and their autoconf get-up requires six dozen dependency tools to build), and doesn't suffer from the irrelevance factor, but if you've got a Linux kernel, you've got to take the evil of at least glibc to obtain a reasonable level of binary compatibility for JDK and the like... also using an all-gnu dev tool chain like in Linuxen and OSX would make sense.
Somehow, it doesn't sound insane to me to consider NetBSD as a Minix killer for the academic world, and a LinBSD distro for us who want a "distro" with the manageability and reviewability of traditional BSD, and the kernel features of modern Linux. Heck, this might even drive some competent *BSD developers to start driving a Linux kernel consistency-clean-up project, which IMHO it rather needs.
What's sad is, that I probably wouldn't be considering this if there had been a fairly timely and deserving successor to FreeBSD 4. I *like* the cleanliness, compactness, attention to detail, and predictability of BSD. But I also need it to run on the hardware I have, with reasonably modern features like working threads on multicore CPUs, and have a reasonable expectancy of a working roadmap for the next 5 years... *sigh*
[Note: some comments above intentionally exaggerated. But not by much.]
I think you missed his point. 4 kWhr for an entire year is impossible if you run so much as a light bulb occasionally.:)
I had to actually go and double-check the electricity bill I referred to. Duh, it was 3965 kWh for 6 months... which makes me in reality an 8 kWh yearly power hog. Bwaah, I can hear the baby squirrels dropping dead from the trees...:-)
I do try, but I don't go out of my way for it... I've got my home computers on 24/7, for example, mainly because I'm fundamentally a lazy person. Simply being a conscious consumer helps to a healthy start - those computers, for example, have fairly modern TFT displays, which enter sleep mode when not in use.
Average American person sucks up over 700 kWh/month. Traditional successfull 'geek' household (decent AC, two-car heated garage, freezer/fridge, range/microwave, CCTV, plasma in the basement, gadgets, 24/7 computers, VAX cluster (winter heating), wireless, hot tub) will eat up 10,000 kWh easily.
Just out of curiosity, I checked my last electricity bill. I run a fairly successful 'geek' household (no AC but in winters we get down to -22F so some heating is involved; no garage either, and I have a projector instead of plasma, but otherwise pretty much what you describe) and I seem to consume about 4 kWh per year. And I drive a nice, roomy Korean car which gets 24 mpg.
I don't doubt your estimates about the average Americans; I was just curious about it. Since we have cold winters, our building code requires considerable insulation and similar considerations (which of course jack up the cost of housing). I remodeled my apartment completely 4 years back and installed low energy versions of all household devices. I just traded my car down to one size smaller, because the top-of-the-line model a) was really really gas-hungry and b) it was a bitch to maneuver downtown Helsinki.
As I traded my car down, I also began to use fuel, which has 5% - the maximum allowed by law here - of alcohol in it. No modifications needed, but it's about 17 euro-cents per gallon more expensive than the lowest grade 95-octane. Which just hit 3.7 euros (= 4.7 US$) per gallon (so the bio-version is 3.87 euros per gallon)!
The points I'm meandering towards are thus: 1) it's quite possible, without much trouble or much investment at all, to decrease your yearly power consumption by a few kWh (or, "Americans seem to use twice what they'd need to for their lifestyle";-). And 2), myself, and most people here I know, would quite probably go for cow-dung/whatnot-greenish electricity if it was no more than about 5% more expensive than coal/nuclear originated. More than that would probably exceed our convenience level (none of the referred to people are environmentalists, just somewhat environmentally aware consumers).
I've run case-sensitive in multiple OSX machines for about a year. I reverted to case-insensitive on my gaming desktop, because some games didn't find their own files... No problems with regular OSX apps or open source stuff (and no need to kludge pkgsrc bootstrap either) in the servers or laptops.
When installing, you need to partition using Disk Utility instead of the helpful installer single-click thingy. Easy as pie (but you do need to know the option exists).
Slashdot Mirror
Have you ever actually used XFCE?
Getting slightly OT here, but... I have, and do. On netbsd, but that shouldn't have a difference. XFCE is significantly snappier than the full-blown Gnome desktop, or KDE, and it comes with all the goodies I've ever needed. Switch on the Platinum look, and we're almost back in the snap-click-happen MacOS 9 days (but everythink actually works now :)
Why, is something broken in -current, or something?
Well, apparently one of the more notable ones involve Indian bakeries:
Of note are improvements in ..., discoveries in nantechnology, ...
The others seem more fluffed up, but this one is crackin'.
They copied even that from the mac? Oh, my head hurts...
I choose "None of the above". You should do.
erm... so you expect me to be sufficient DRM? I hate to tell it to you man, but I've got a lousy ear for music. I'd probably be a quite lossy solution.
The one that finishes booting first?
Yep, the mac.
The parent has the right of it. What you describe is exactly the "no-frills" Slashdot phone. Something that is not so much a phone but a communication device. A nice bonus would be iSync support for the calendar. I'd certainly get one in a heartbeat in favor of my current Nokia flip-keyboard brick thingy with built-in Space Invaders.
The Nokia 11xx series phones are butt ugly and don't have bluetooth for things like tangle-free headsets. Otherwise they'd be fairly decent minimalist options.
Another Mail add-on would be to integrate PGP/GPG in a seamless, easy to use manner so that everyone and their grandma could use it, perhaps by default.
Check out GPGMail. It works seamlessly and really quite well - we use this at the office all the time.
Now a real killer app would be something to make the PGP infrastructure key management, authentication and authorization as easy as it is with X.509 (GPG Keychain Access is a start, but not a solution). Then people could use it by default, and we could start marking all non-signed (and some signed) mail automatically as spam.
That Carmen mix was indeed brilliant! Good tip, thank you. And a good move from PG. Methinks he (re)gained a fan here.
Its probably a better time to start a debate about how we here in Europe can stop the Americans from erroding our existing privacy laws to suit themselves.
The discussion has already been going on for a while. Consider, for example, the recent airline information leak issue. The very basic improvement of going from a "pull" model to a "push" model was a step in the right direction.
To note, I e-mailed my EU parliament rep about this issue while the talks were ongoing. She responded back the next day with a very thoughtful reply, and somehow a few days later my "at least" scenario came to be. It gave at least a nice illusion of working democracy.
Drag and drop will always be the best way for us geeks to get our music on these things
Oh, how times have changed... and the definition of geek! Drag-and-drop, point-and-click, sheesh...
But I sort of see a point here. Maybe we should establish a new term for this "GUI-geek" generation? iGeek?
Unfortunately most filesystems don't have a way of being told that a snapshot is being taken, and to checkpoint themselves.
FFS in *BSD has had snapshot support for some time. Although I never had problems restoring FFS's dump'd in the pre-snapshot days (and yes, I had to recover from a few complete RAID array blow-outs in very actual practice... flaky MegaRAID controllers, and whatnot... ugh).
dump(8) rules.
Also I have never quite understood the Linux XYZFS of the day. Sure, FFS ain't the latest and greatest, but it's quite darn robust and snappy enough for most practical uses, and basic stuff like restores work, and work reliably. So why no FFS in *nux?
Ditto. The other reason I prefer Safari is its better use of screen space. Firefox just has too much waste pixels.
The same reasons actually make me prefer Mail.app over thunderbird - with the added nuisance that tb doesn't deal gracefully with migrating between networks.
If you think BSD is the right way to go, then why do you even care about GPLv2 vs. GPLv3?
My concern is for the future of the FOSS movement; not for what bits of it I can use. I do agree with what you are saying, but it rather missed my point. (Well, at this hour, my lack of clarity of expression probably contributed somewhat :-)
Commercial ventures (well, successful ones anyways) will always asses what they have as applicable resources, and build from that. FOSS is a resource pool of increasing importance and usefulness. When FOSS is used, and it makes sense (it usually does), any subsequent development will be pushed back upstream, effectively contributing to FOSS. (And if the source was BSD-licensed, "any" can be "most", which makes it feasible to base also more hairy derivative works on - as was with my sample case which involved non-general-purpose proprietary hacks.) But if there is no usable FOSS component, then one will be implemented in-house and that's that. Practicality rules.
The FOSS applicable to any commercial venture is BSD based. Most GPLv2 stuff also qualifies for most ventures. GPLv3 stuff will not qualify for most ventures at all. Consequently the contributions from commercial organizations to FOSS will decrease in direct proportion to v3 adoption. Which, I think, will hurt FOSS overall. This is why I think GPLv3, as it is currently written, (and will be adopted by new FOSS writers by default,) will hurt FOSS more than help it.
Note that I am not saying GPLv3 is a bad license. I guess I am mostly wondering about the goals of it. In the grander scheme of things, it seems to me that the apparent downsides seriously outweigh the useful updates. But maybe that's just me and my cynicism...
Why, squirrels, of course. Giant, fluffy, man-eating (re: mankind will be gone), amphibious squirrels.
This is my design, I call it intelligent, hence it must be so.
The parent got the gist of it.
I have participated in projects which involved patents and resulted in sellable products - and every single line of code (protocol stacks, device drivers, bug fixes etc) that was not crucial to the heart of the customized product were released as open source. It didn't make any sense not to. We always used BSD codebases, though, somewhat wary as to what mess GPLv2 might get us into. With GPLv3, GPL'd code would not even enter the consideration.
One must also remember that many FOSS authors automatically use GPL because it is "teh license", basically due to the publicity. Much in the same way people use GNU/Linux because it is "teh OS". This means that whatever becomes of the next GPL version, will be automatically used in many projects. Consequently GPLv3, as it now reads, would result in lessening participation and contributions from commercial organizations and many skilled individuals alike. I do not see it as a good thing for FOSS. IMHO, the Berkeley folks got it right ages ago.
Google is the default also in Safari, the Mac OS X default browser. I guess we could generalize that "I bet there is a correlation between the switcing rate from IE to *[xX]" :-)
Yikes! I had to upgrade mine with a 1 GHz CPU and a Radeon 9800 before Doom 3 was playable, though :-P
On the other hand, I'm now running 10.4.8 on two 19" tfts, building pkgsrc-2006Q3 beside Safari on this screen, vlc playing the latest NCIS ep on the other, bittorrent downloading some anime beside it...
Every release of OSX, up to 10.4.3 or so, just kept running better and better on this rig. I haven't seen any significant speed-ups since, tho.
My upgrade path will probably be a 2004-ish dual-1,25 G4, when this machine expires. (Which may still take some years...)
That said, the US can't really complain too loudly if EU carriers stop giving them all the info they want now - it's clearly against EU privacy laws
Exactly. All you travelling EU citizens, make sure you let your EU representative know your - and your friends' and colleagues' - stance on the matter asap. (If they are worth their salt, their EU rep info page links to their web site or some such, which contains direct contact information. If it does not, then you know what to do in the next election, no?) I did. Laws are laws, and our privacy laws don't need any more eroding, especially over such lunacy.
Heck, let's go back to visas - then at least everyone will explicitly know what information they are handing over, and they do it in person. This is what we do with unstable or dubious countries, isn't it? It would also be better for "terrorist detection", wouldn't it? Should my business require a visit to the Other Side (unlikely in the current atmosphere), I don't see applying for a visa being much of an additional pain - and then at least I'd know exactly what data was given, to whom, when, and maybe even why (I have lost my mind).
It probably helps to be a Finn right now, so this applies especially to all of you Finns out there. There is a distinct, non-zero possibility that Tuomioja will actually get your message from a fellow countryperson rep, and it could have some influence on the actual negotiations. Let democracy work for you, by you, right now.
Of course, I am known as being an excessive optimist... but if you don't try, you'll definitely have no input on the matter.
There is an established way to do (roughly - without the detention) this - simply require a visa for entry, interview required at US embassy (effectively US soil, US procedures). It's even already established that airlines can be fined for bringing a passenger without the right visa.
Exactly. The solution to the current problem is to require visa. This way every citizen wishing to visit stateside will know what of their personal information has been given out - and they have signed it off themselves. This is exactly what the visa system is for.
As a citizen and a reasonably frequent flyer, I want to know which airlines did give out information last weekend. Those criminals will not be getting my money.
Friends and myself have moved most of our FreeBSD boxes to NetBSD. As FreeBSD has grown bulky and fat (like many linux distros), NetBSD was there to fall back on. NetBSD feels and acts like UNIX in a world where everyone wants to act like Windows.
I completely second this. I used to be a linux user until the late nineties, when I actually had to maintain a bunch of real-world servers, with some security considerations -- i.e. I needed to know what code our servers were actually running. What a horrible mess the Slackware installations suddenly were.
At that point I migrated our company to FreeBSD 4. Lately, due to the problems with FBSD 4 getting obsolete hardware-support-wise, and FBSD 5 not looking very promising, we've been steadily migrating to NetBSD 2 and then 3. Your summary is very apt for what I also have learned during this migration.
What I have been toying with in my head is to take the Linux kernel, mix-and-match a BSD-style quality-controlled "base distribution" from GNU tools and BSD userland, using the neat and compact rc.d system (who, ever, have you actually known to use runlevels other than 0, 1, 3 and 6?), fix the ages-old (smallish but annoying) linux brokenness (like ifconfig not having the -u flag, or not showing link status, or all kernel/driver boot-up messages being incoherent), and put pkgsrc on top. This approach would, in effect, provide us the best of both worlds...
The NetBSD kernel is an excellent study piece, being well made and well documented, but the Linux kernel is simply much more relevant. The NetBSD userland is superior to the pseudo-random GNU mess (where everyone's gotten their toy flags in and their autoconf get-up requires six dozen dependency tools to build), and doesn't suffer from the irrelevance factor, but if you've got a Linux kernel, you've got to take the evil of at least glibc to obtain a reasonable level of binary compatibility for JDK and the like... also using an all-gnu dev tool chain like in Linuxen and OSX would make sense.
Somehow, it doesn't sound insane to me to consider NetBSD as a Minix killer for the academic world, and a LinBSD distro for us who want a "distro" with the manageability and reviewability of traditional BSD, and the kernel features of modern Linux. Heck, this might even drive some competent *BSD developers to start driving a Linux kernel consistency-clean-up project, which IMHO it rather needs.
What's sad is, that I probably wouldn't be considering this if there had been a fairly timely and deserving successor to FreeBSD 4. I *like* the cleanliness, compactness, attention to detail, and predictability of BSD. But I also need it to run on the hardware I have, with reasonably modern features like working threads on multicore CPUs, and have a reasonable expectancy of a working roadmap for the next 5 years... *sigh*
[Note: some comments above intentionally exaggerated. But not by much.]
For the record, OS X ships with no antivirus software. Not needed.
OS X Server does ship with antivirus software. It needs to protect those windows users from e-mail viruses.
I think you missed his point. 4 kWhr for an entire year is impossible if you run so much as a light bulb occasionally. :)
I had to actually go and double-check the electricity bill I referred to. Duh, it was 3965 kWh for 6 months... which makes me in reality an 8 kWh yearly power hog. Bwaah, I can hear the baby squirrels dropping dead from the trees... :-)
Wow, you must be really energy efficient.
I do try, but I don't go out of my way for it... I've got my home computers on 24/7, for example, mainly because I'm fundamentally a lazy person. Simply being a conscious consumer helps to a healthy start - those computers, for example, have fairly modern TFT displays, which enter sleep mode when not in use.
Average American person sucks up over 700 kWh/month. Traditional successfull 'geek' household (decent AC, two-car heated garage, freezer/fridge, range/microwave, CCTV, plasma in the basement, gadgets, 24/7 computers, VAX cluster (winter heating), wireless, hot tub) will eat up 10,000 kWh easily.
Just out of curiosity, I checked my last electricity bill. I run a fairly successful 'geek' household (no AC but in winters we get down to -22F so some heating is involved; no garage either, and I have a projector instead of plasma, but otherwise pretty much what you describe) and I seem to consume about 4 kWh per year. And I drive a nice, roomy Korean car which gets 24 mpg.
I don't doubt your estimates about the average Americans; I was just curious about it. Since we have cold winters, our building code requires considerable insulation and similar considerations (which of course jack up the cost of housing). I remodeled my apartment completely 4 years back and installed low energy versions of all household devices. I just traded my car down to one size smaller, because the top-of-the-line model a) was really really gas-hungry and b) it was a bitch to maneuver downtown Helsinki.
As I traded my car down, I also began to use fuel, which has 5% - the maximum allowed by law here - of alcohol in it. No modifications needed, but it's about 17 euro-cents per gallon more expensive than the lowest grade 95-octane. Which just hit 3.7 euros (= 4.7 US$) per gallon (so the bio-version is 3.87 euros per gallon)!
The points I'm meandering towards are thus: 1) it's quite possible, without much trouble or much investment at all, to decrease your yearly power consumption by a few kWh (or, "Americans seem to use twice what they'd need to for their lifestyle" ;-). And 2), myself, and most people here I know, would quite probably go for cow-dung/whatnot-greenish electricity if it was no more than about 5% more expensive than coal/nuclear originated. More than that would probably exceed our convenience level (none of the referred to people are environmentalists, just somewhat environmentally aware consumers).
I've run case-sensitive in multiple OSX machines for about a year. I reverted to case-insensitive on my gaming desktop, because some games didn't find their own files... No problems with regular OSX apps or open source stuff (and no need to kludge pkgsrc bootstrap either) in the servers or laptops.
When installing, you need to partition using Disk Utility instead of the helpful installer single-click thingy. Easy as pie (but you do need to know the option exists).