Two things that have been annoying me for a long time have been fixed recently, and I discovered those two new features the same day (rainy week-ends are good for you).

• OpenSSH’s problem with networks with large bandwidth-delay product has been fixed in OpenSSH 5.1. The problem was that OpenSSH has its own windowing system over TCP’s, and that its buffer were two small to be able to maximise the bandwidth on, say, a 1 Gbps link with 10ms latency, so you would get a ridiculous bandwidth because of that, even if TCP was correctly tuned. A patch (hpn-ssh) has been existing for a long time, but strangely, people don’t like patching their SSH servers and clients.
  That means I can now get decent bandwidth using scp or rsync over long distance links.
• The radeon driver now supports TV out for R600 cards (including my X1250). I can now stop using the proprietary fglrx driver, and make the computer under the TV completely free!

OK, both changes have been there for a long time, but I’m sure I’m not the only one who didn’t notice them at the time. Big Thank You to both groups of developers (especially to the ati/radeon developers, who have been very helpful on IRC to troubleshoot my setup).