~10 years ago I lived in a house in Cardiff which still used fuse wire instead of breakers, so I think there's still probably a few out there...

They are indeed good connectors and are fantastic in server racks or on the backs of UPSs, but I wouldn't fancy switching my UK plugs for them anywhere else. Having to change a fuse in the wall socket when you want to unplug a phone charger and plug in a 3kW heater? No thanks...

The Swedish Pirate Party managed to get a staggering 7% of the votes in their recent elections... Do you not think with a bit of PR you've got a serious chance of actually winning elections here given how most people would rather laugh at Gordon Brown than do anything to help if he were about to be hit by a truck? Just look at how many people have been voting for the BNP recently... Have you got a contingency plan in case you end up in No.10, or is that a subject for a future Ask Slashdot? ;)

I too have been playing real guitars for some time (20 years) and have found that my skill level has sharply increased over the last year or so as I find I'm gaining strength, speed and coordination in my left little finger, which I simply couldn't be bothered to exercise enough before picking up GH/RB

It's not supported very well in that nobody's bothered to make a build for my Debian Etch workstation. Etch is only 2 years old for christ's sake! Why isn't there even just a statically compiled version?

I also note the typical unqualified "all open source software is bulletproof" response. The version in Debian will neither play DVDs at all (WTF?) nor seek through many types of videos on my workstation without crashing (libmatroska::KaxCluster::GlobalTimecodeScale() const: Assertion `bTimecodeScaleIsSet' failed). You should see the problems I had with it recently under _clean_ installs of XP (refusing to play anything) and OSX (locking up the machine) too... Even when it does work (which admittedly is most of the time), it's still prone to the occasional lock-up.

> Does this actually work 100%? How?
No. The only reason I run Debian on my desktop instead of FreeBSD is because I need to use VMWare, which hasn't run under the Linux compat stuff since VMWare Workstation 3, but given that it *did* work once is a bit of a tribute to its completeness.

I spent several years running an extremely busy yet stable Counter-Strike server under Linux compat, which performed significantly better (lower latency, less CPU load) than when running Linux natively on the same hardware. Good times...

> what does FBSD do when I open("/proc/*") and start parsing stuff?
If you've got linprocfs in your kernel and mounted, it should work in most cases.

In general, linux compat stuff works surprisingly well unless you need a high level of kernel interaction such as modern VMWare releases. In 99% of cases It Just Works.

Who uses the live cd?

Personally I tend to just use the bootonly.iso - it's quicker than downloading the whole of disc1, then burning it, then having to read it off slow media...

Yep, very much so, to the point where I worry about being pulled by coppers in my car because I have a breaker bar in the rear footwell. Ok so it's there because I don't want it rolling all around the boot and it's too big to fit in the toolbox I carry in the car, but it /is/ enough to be charged for possession of an offensive weapon

Thinking about it, I may resort to taking out an AA membership instead of taking the risk of falling foul of dumb laws

If a copper catches you walking down the (UK) street with a screwdriver in your pocket, you're going to be arrested and charged for carrying an offensive weapon...

Do you need the "and myBlob is not null"?

IIRC count(foo) returns the count of rows where foo is not null hence why a lot of the time where foo is a column name, it should really be * because the coder mistakenly thought specifying a column meant the db server has to do less work

> what is the compelling reason for choosing Linux over OpenSolaris or, say, PC-BSD

VMware. Only thing stopping me from running FreeBSD on my work desktops