Because of who we are and what we do, a number of people who post to newsgroups like to hide themselves; use anonymous names, try to stop archives from retaining messages and so on. I, personally, am open with who I am and what I am but this doesn’t mean I decry the attempts of others to maintain anonymity. One such attempt is the use of X-No-Archive: headers in newsgroup postings.
Many of us are geeks who like to play with technology “because it is there”. We might want to try out a new OS, or a new piece of software. Maybe install a beta version of something, or be able to test a client-server setup. Historically that has meant having one (or more) test machines, configured as multi-boot. In 2002 I spent $600 on a Celeron 1200Mhz machine with 256Mb RAM and a 40Gb disk for precisely this purpose; it multi-booted into XP, NetBSD, Solaris 86, Fedora… at that point I ran out of primary boot partitions.
In my spare room I have what I grandiously like to call a library. (By library I mean approx 112ft of bookshelf space, on 3 of the 4 walls). What does any library need? A computer! Internet access, ability to print, access files etc. I have a random vision of the future of having my eBooks managed “somehow” (plug the eBook reader in, download the book(s) I want…). Nothing high powered; possibly playing youtube videos would be the hardest thing this computer would need to do.
