>>>Yeah, millions of dollars in fines vs. billions of dollars in profit really dissuades those naughty contractors

It does actually. My company was fined ~700 million about three years ago, and now they come down hard on the employees to charge time precisely. Even if we take a barthroom break, we're supposed to subtract that 0.1 or 0.2 from the government project and put it in an overhead account. My company doesn't want to be fined again.

Way to not read the guy's WHOLE message. His point was even about that. His point was that Cars are more dangerous than guns, and yet we let car drivers operate their equipment with minimal oversight.

I have run Linux on my desktop since RH 4.2 and have not used Windows seriously since NT4. I program in a dozen languages well enough to have a significant patch in the Postgres optimizer. My phone is four years old, I've replaced the screen once and the battery twice. I'm about as geeky as they get, but certainly not a gadget or Apple freak, and yet I bought an iPad yesterday.

Why? Because my wife's ancient iBook G4 is on it's last leg, and we have really come to love casual browsing in the living room. The iPad is not a computer, it is not terribly useful for general computing tasks. Anyone who has used one would understand this. It is however a gorgeous device that is braindead simple to use for its intended purpose. So much so that my 72 year old aunt, who refuses to touch a keyboard, actually surfed the web for the first time yesterday, and enjoyed the experience.

Hate on it all you want, but in ten years the only people with clunky old computers with keyboards will be those who write for a living (code or otherwise).

Amen.

Does Win7/Vista still hang for a few seconds every time you click on the empty optical drive in Explorer?

Besides, my gigantor monitor is a Samsung.

I watched the Lynch movie as a teenager back in the late 80s long before I read the book. Therefore I did and do not have the book snob attitude to pre-judge the movie by. I only read the book because of the captivating feel of the movie and the intriguing storyline. The made-for-TV remake was closer to the book, but far from enthralling.

I think Lynch is a lot like Kuberick. You either love his stuff or hate hate it, there is little in between.

Mr. Albanach Surly should also mention that both the programs he linked are basically dead, unmaintained relics. One of the wikipedia pages he linked even mentioned this. He did actually read what he linked, right?

The OP has asked a very interesting question though. If you could take something like xmove or Xpra and make an awesome window manager aware/compatible, it would be very interesting software indeed.

The postgres community definitely rocks, both on IRC and the mailing lists. That is the major reason my company uses it pretty much exclusively anymore, because we feel confident that whatever problems we run into we can work through.

BTW, David Fetter is in this thread, just look for dfetter with the four digit /. ID with the highly rated post...

I happen to know that right after the Columbia accident, all the telemetry data was loaded into a PG database and that is what was used for analysis. At one point tracking the entire .org domain was done with PG as well. I've always thought of MySQL as a racehorse, no other horses can compete for speed when running around a short track (IE read-mostly website). PG is more of a draft horse, able to plow the fields, or pull the wagon, or do a million other things that MySQL is not appropriate for. Oracle would be an Elephant, too huge and expensive to maintain for most things while SQL Server would be a mule, a hopefully sterile off-breed of a horse (Sybase) and a donkey (Windows).

THIS! Holy hell they look like canvas. You can see a distortion pattern running top to bottom and left to right, but it isn't at a 90 it is funky. Hopefully something was just whack and once they finish tweaking everything the noise will disappear. If not then at least it is the ESA (!NASA) that borked it this time?

My freshman year I bought every textbook and hauled them all around. Then I came to realize that in most classes I didn't actually need the book in class, so I started leaving it in my car or at home. By my senior year I only bought two books for nine classes. I found that in most classes (all but math) that simply going to class, taking good notes, and studying the material with my study group was enough for me to learn it, the book was just dead weight.

Oh come on, everyone knows the hand scrawled notes in the margins is where you find the most interesting spells.

Is a slideshow on my old Dell D820 (core duo, 2 gigs of ram, FF 3.5, Ubuntu Hardy)