DISQUS

It doesn't seem like it would be hard to make it bootable. There are PCI based IDE and SATA adapters, which allow the devices they are attached to to be booted from. I suppose if it truly has a different setup than a normal drive, it might pose a problem, but what is the physical limitation on normal IDE/SATA? It is not a specification on the storage, just on the interface.

It makes perfect sense that the computer hardware industry is now racing towards low prices. Computers made by these companies are generally overpriced, compared to their components, and people do not need nearly as much computing power as they have now. The only real reason people keep buying new computers is because the increasingly bloated Windows OS slows anything more than a couple years old to a standstill. I have a feeling that either OS X or Linux will make the turnaround towards smaller devices much faster, unless Windows puts a lot of work into it.

Not to mention that there is no reason aliens would communicate in base 10. If anything is most universal, it would be a fraction in unary or something. And the fact that pi is based on Euclidean geometry, which is inherently flawed in a way that should be apparent to any advanced race. Utter nonsense.

I totally agree with all of this, but you haven't even touched on the fact that you can see and modify any source code! I suppose it's only useful for developers, but it is truly awesome. Also, noticed that everyone seems to call it Linux Ubuntu. Linux is obviously the noun, while the distro should be an adjective, so it would either be Ubuntu or Ubuntu Linux. There is no Ubuntu BSD or Ubuntu Windows so that would make the most sense.

Sounds awesome, but...

Isn't the PS3 (the 7-SPE Cell processor) capable of achieving almost a TFLOP by itself? Even though that is only with single-floating-point numbers, that is much cheaper... what would the difference be between this BlueGene supercomputer and a mere 30 or so PS3s? Not to mention if you added a powerful cooling system and overclocked them. In fact, I heard that the most powerful supercomputing cluster in history was in fact a collection of PS3s combined over the internet to achieve over 1 PFLOP, albeit with a extremely slow "system bus" (the internet).

This type of thing happens with all programs and OSes. New hardware lets designers make more bloated programs, which then cancel out the effectiveness of the hardware. IT'S INSANE! The software should become more efficient as time goes on, not less.

This is why I use Linux.

Well, I guess the software on the OS is important, but it still isn't what I consider the most important thing. The OS is by far the most used of your programs, and it allows all the other ones to work. When it crashes, they all crash. It's like saying the sun isn't important because we can't do anything to it. If the OS wasn't important, wouldn't everyone use Linux because it is free?