Thanks for this link, will save me some time in the future. I've dabbled in picking up quaint old speakers at the local Goodwill and then "updating" them with newer electronics and speakers, but building it all from scratch is something I would love to try.

VIC-20 with the 8 kB expansion cartridge.

If it's not Dual-Panel, then it is dead to me. Nothing increases my working efficiency as much. TotalCommander all the way.

Cool to know. But I've bought TotalCommander back in 1996... and am still using it. The best $10 I paid. Ever.

Very nice. So far I've not needed a dedicated Linux box for a router, but this is tempting me.

But more on the topic. Macs only defragment files smaller than 20Mb... I work with many VMs with that grow and shrink. Also, Steam client for Mac had to build in a defragmenter since the game files also suffered eventually. So not 100% in fact.

Not really... the placebo effect and actually have a positive real effect. From WikiPedia:

OS X automatically defragments files less than 20 MBs in size. (And only if you have more than 10% space free too?)

I kinda agree, and have been trying to use Windows 8. Unfortunately I find it was made more for content consumption than content creation, and really requires a touchscreen to be used effectively. I use it for work and some games (the rest of the time I use Mac and Linux as well). There are a few things I like about…

As for the dev team ignoring it, it may be a case of egos and PR. Kinda like the "Macs don't need to be defragmented" Apple stance. Seems enough people are reporting perceived positive results from this... even if it cannot be explained, the results are good enough reason.

If performance is gained through incremental increases in speed or priority, sure.

I've been ripping my DVDs using Handbrake on OS X for years (and still do).

Besides run/stop-restore,

run/stop-restore

I've been using Secure Settings as a plugin to Tasker... useful features.

4) ssh into it to manually fix permissions on group-shared folders so all users have rights to all project files.

Work out the energy consumption, and let me know how much that works out over the longer term. Also I'd rather pay a bit extra and NOT lose my data.

I'm just curious, how many people here actually used a Synology *and* FreeNAS both to compare them? And then really found FreeNAS to be better?

Tried FreeNAS. What a waste of time. Not that it was terrible... just spend a lot of _time_ babysitting it. It was rather "Meh...", although much better than my previous NAS solution (Buffalo NAS). As for cheap, the Synology's sleep and low power modes actually work so well... making it actually cheaper than FreeNAS…

PS: It does indeed look like Parallels 8 seems faster than VMware 5, but I'm sure VMware will catch up again soon (like it did with previous versions).