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The google translations are a lot better, but I found out that if I go from, say french to arabic to english, instead of directly from french to english, the idioms seem to be translated better.

go figure......

Yeah, it's enough to drive one to drinking....

Maybe there should be a survey done about the effects on longevity based upon whether or not one reads all these "studies".

I did. The log files were not present in /var/log.

Even opensuse's System log viewer could not find /var/log/messages

I did not see /var/log/mail nor did I even see /var/log/messages.

When I went into opensuse's Control Center, and drilled down to view the system log, I got an error message that /var/log/messages could not be found.

Fog.

I see no such menu structure in either opensuse or Windows 7.

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I punted the tivo and watched the video on my notebook, sans ads.

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But now Linux seems to be getting closer to fog than clarity.

One example:

Last week I installed opensuse. When I tried to send an email using the mail command, Postfix was giving me odd permission errors for maildrop. So I went to look at the Postfix log, and there was none that I could find.

One step closer to the fog of Windows, where the system is hidden behind magical portals that only a few know how to access....

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They did a listening test comparing a $300 Pioneer receiver with two $10,000 "audiophile" mono tube amplifiers.

At the beginning of the test, the listeners knew which device they were listening to and, predictably, the Pioneer receiver was painful to listen to, destroying the music.The mono amps were all that is wonderful in listening.

Then the identities were masked and the listening test was done again. Most of the listeners could not tell the two apart, guessing incorrectly about half the time.

A sad commentary on the industry when an audiophile club cannot even tell a $300 receiver from $20,000 of audiophile amplification.

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"If you want to build a ship, don't herd people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery

When I was faced with the task of configuring my many Apache virtual hosts with individual IPv6 addresses while keeping them all with the same IPv4 address (throw in a couple of SSL certs as well), I jumped into the Apache config files. After a few hours of Apache frustration, I took a peek at nginx. I have not looked back since.

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Within an hour of installing nginx, I had all the sites running as I wanted, using the one IPv4 address, the individual IPv6 addresses, and the appropriate SSL certs.

I could not believe how simple it was to configure nginx.

I still have my long-term MSDOS backups from 1991. The backup file is a whopping 13MB in size, and that includes the OS, a word processor, a C compiler and my source code.

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I just made sure that I continually copied forward the backup files I wanted to retain. Each iteration of archival storage increased about ten-fold, so space wasn't a problem.

I think it is more important to have a good archival process in place. To the OP, the error you made was leaving all the data you want on old floppies and IDE drives, etc.. You should have moved that data off to more current media as your processing moved to more current media.

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Declaring CS to be a foreign language may have unintended consequences, like mandatory CS subtitles on TV shows and movies.