The fungus took my baby!

Are you actually old enough to remember that story, or are you just regurgitating what you've heard somewhere?

It always amazes me how popular that reference is. Most recently I heard it in the movie "Tropic Thunder".

People who have actually sat down and compared both libraries, and went with GTK.

I'd love to hear the reasons.

You'd be nuts to use GTK for any new project. I fear it'll be propped up for quite a while to come, though, mainly by Redhat.

Seriously.

Huh, no shit? I thought you were joking. Seriously.

He's already being courted by advertizers like this, and is apparantly willing to work with them - he can't be trusted.

That's taking it a bit far. The guy doesn't even accept donations for his work, so I don't think we need to worry about his motivation. He knows he's treading a very fine line between keeping his users and pushing them to a fork; the recent NoScript issue shows what happens to authors who stretch it too far.

My take is that he just wants the attention. When the NoScript issue arose, Palant suddenly found himself with a soapbox to stand on. Maybe he's milking the attention a little, wants to raise his profile - no big deal. Maybe he wants to become a fully fledged Mozilla developer, rather than an extension author on the 'outside'? Maybe he'd like to see ABP's functionality included in Firefox by default? That would mean reducing its power somewhat.

I dunno, but this isn't a big deal right now.

Why the hell do I need a diagram of my computer, my house, and the globe to explain how my computer is connected to my network and the internet?

Because, as a busy mother, you don't have time to figure out the mumbo-jumbo of networking. Microsoft's Windows Vista Home Premium edition is designed to streamline your online experience, helping you get your work done faster, easier, and more secure than ever.

I don't get it. You got these right: "reaction times", "things", "window switches", and "animations".

And yet, somehow, you think the plural of menu is menu's, and you kept using it.

Something is wired wrong in your brain, my friend.

Sounds like you want SDelete:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-au/sysinternals/bb897443.aspx

You can use SDelete both to securely delete existing files, as well as to securely erase any file data that exists in the unallocated portions of a disk (including files that you have already deleted or encrypted). SDelete implements the Department of Defense clearing and sanitizing standard DOD 5220.22-M, to give you confidence that once deleted with SDelete, your file data is gone forever. Note that SDelete securely deletes file data, but not file names located in free disk space.

I work across the street from his old lab (on Tesla st no less)

What work do you do there?

Not that it's any of my business. Google Maps just makes me curious.

seriously?

No, not seriously.

Forget everything, can you believe the lemmings download it from Pirate sites? An operating system?

I downloaded a copy of Vista 64 from a demonoid.com torrent. Already had a legit key from MSDNAA, just didn't have a copy of the x64 version. Microsoft puts the SHA1 sum for the ISO file on their MSDN site, so you can verify that it's an untampered copy. A bit like that cheesy scene (one of many) from the movie Swordfish, where Travolta barks to one of his cronies "Verify this!" and, after a pause, the computer dude says "Verified!". Fuck, that movie was fucking awful.

Or are you suggesting that you can slip in a trojan and still get the SHA1 sum to match, using some collision that nobody else knows about?

I've been considering using Windows 7 when I buy a new laptop later this year, but I have a serious question:

How the hell do Windows users backup their files?

I haven't used Windows properly since I was a kid, and I didn't care about backups back then. Nowadays I use rsync every day to mirror files onto an external USB drive and over the network. Once a week I do an incremental backup with rdiff-backup.

Are there any basic, robust tools like these for Windows?

Also, what's the new "Power Shell" like? Is it like bash? Can you run curses programs yet, like mutt? Or would I have to learn a GUI like Thunderbird?

I've been on Linux for so long, I'm actually finding it harder than I imagined to see how I can work with Windows again. I tried Vista and it was actually kinda slick, so I wouldn't mind it on my laptop. It seems like a Macbook would be easier though.

fascist system administrators

Anyone know how old Stallman was when he wrote that?

Just sounds so juvenile.

Currently on 8.04, I'll be upgrading to 8.10 sometime after 9.04 is released.

Staying 6 months behind is a reasonable compromise. Let the lab rats (er, enthusiasts!) debug the new stuff first. Last time I checked 8.10 in a VM there was something like 320MB worth of updated packages.

As for the packages themselves, run a local apt proxy like approx, especially if you have more than one Debian or Ubuntu system. It keeps a copy of every .deb you download, and automatically purges the ones that are outdated.

MPlayer's biggest drawback is the fact that without some sort of frontend, it's UI stinks.

Are you kidding? I absolutely love the lack of frontend.

F: toggle fullscreen
o: see time counter
left/right arrows: skip 5 sec
up/down arrows: skip 1 min
page up/down: skip 10 min

That's all the UI I've ever needed.

What I love most is how fast and simple mplayer is. Seeking is instant, even on my old P3.

I just tried out the Ubuntu and Kubuntu 9.04 betas earlier today, and I think my interest in both GNOME and KDE is just about worn out.

Both are really quite bloated. I've been on Debian and KDE 3 for years, but I think I'll be switching to a stand-alone window manager like fluxbox, or maybe Xfce, the next time I have to upgrade.

GNOME on Ubuntu felt as sluggish and amateurish as ever. No amount of new themes and rehashed icons can improve GNOME. As a KDE user I was looking forward to KDE 4.2 but christ, it's so damn cluttered. I think they've actually added more clutter since 3.5, not taken it away. Every damn UI element flickers and flashes with a mouseover effect as you move around; some kind of indexing service is hitting the disk in the background; there's a plethora of desktop views or applets or whatever they're called, none of which I'm interested in; there's a new K menu that looks like it was a reject from Windows XP, and which takes several clicks to hunt around for what you're looking for; the default widget theme has super thick borders, even the pull down menus have thick borders around the menu items. The whole thing is just over-cooked. I couldn't make sense of it, frankly.

Sure, I could turn off or tweak most of that junk. But I think what I saw today is what happens when you try to copy Windows and Mac too closely. You end up copying the bad as well as the good. You inherit the same limitations and the same performance standards. It's a poor form of competition, and I despair at how much programmer effort must have gone into creating all this bloated mimicry.

Having said that, I only just scratched the surface. I know how good Qt 4 is, and I'm sure developing apps with the KDE4 framework is much nicer than KDE3. It's just that the result on the desktop (both of them) is a bit of a let down.

Is ECC memory worth the money in a machine you use to check your E-mail?

Unbuffered ECC is only a few $ more than unbuffered non-ECC. It's only 9 chips per side instead of 8, after all. The performance impact is marginal.

I see no reason not to use ECC except that Intel doesn't want you to. It seems they want to keep ECC as a 'server' feature (as if your desktop at home isn't 'serving' you your data). So all their consumer chipsets don't support it, and the i7's memory controller doesn't either. AMD doesn't play that game with their chips, but it seems only ASUS actually implements the ECC support on most of their boards.