Looking at Jack Vance's books on Amazon, many from the 2nd page onwards are not in print, which is a huge shame.

The only way to get some of his older stuff was to spend thousands on the VIE.
(MS's Paul Allen bought dozens of these collections for libraries around the world.)

Even when I lived 15 minutes away every visit was confusing because everything there changed so often.
And it's not as diverse and interesting as it used to be anyway. Things are moving online or into super-stores like Yodobashi.

Show your face coward!
(Honestly, I don't know why I'm bothering ...)

My point is that MS finally gets it now.
They have found ways to _harness_ open source developers rather than fighting them.

You make a valid point despite your sarcasm.
J++ (and so J#) was a failed attempt to do the above.

... has really been to "embrace" it. (As usual!)

Think about it like this:
- Ms-PL (and 4 or so other licenses)
- CodePlex
- Free versions of Visual Studio

Now developers can write open source for Windows & .NET with MS versions of everything the traditional open source world used to provide.
Instead of developing with Java or gcc for other VMs or Linux!

Castle Wolfenstein 30 years late.

That idea also bothers cosmologists - we should assume there is nothing special about our place in the universe (except for the Anthropic Principle).
In fact, given the recent Kepler data there are 100 million reasons why we're likely not special, and probably not the first space-faring civilization.

Wouldn't surprise me. Bet the conspiracy theorists are already using this one.

Thanks a lot for the info.
This is for the wife's iBook G3, but a quick google around found only marginal success with Ubuntu.
Maybe Gentoo then ...

Gee, all these nice replies but no mods - weird ... thanks guys!

Thanks, but they dropped G3 support.

Then again, it's closed source, pricey and runs Amiga apps.
Any suggestions for Linux on G3?

Server farms that is! Thanks WETA.