I'm a CS&E major at Ohio State. Starting way back with introduction to C++, you're immersed into the unix environment (Solaris 8). Yeah, it's old and such, but it's good enough for what we need. The choices of desktops are CDE or openwin, but if there was a decent GUI on there, I think most students would try avoiding the command line whenever possible.

My only gripes with them is the only show you how to use Emacs and never suggest there are alternatives to it such as vim (though they only installed vi, so they must be emacs fans :p. Another gripe is they teach you C-Shell and awk/sed if you take a course strictly on Unix. How often is Cshell really used these days over say bash? Same with awk/sed. They have seperate courses on perl, but perl has much more use than awk/sed do.

I'm also not sure how much they upgraded the system, because I'll see warnings and errors for things in java that are part of the latest revisions to the libraries, but javac doesn't like it on Solaris even if eclipse says it's okay. That wouldnt be such a problem if the guidelines said you had to make sure it compiles in Solaris not to receive a zero. So in other words, they're telling you to use outdated implementations of code.

I guess if they forget to send the pigeons for a few trips and go OMG we have too many photos and send them all at once, that would be a pigeon denial of service attack.

cygwin is basically a wrapper for cmd.exe, so you still have access to everything you would in cmd.exe, just a better scripting language (bash) to do it in. Try it before you knock it.

I thought he was talking more about this

But they do make their own motherboards, they make their own cooling solutions, they often meticulously design power supplies to be quiet, they will often times design the battery. They design the cases to be sturdy, have excellent heat conduction and they are quiet.

Actually, Intel builds their motherboards for for Apple http://news.zdnet.co.uk/emergingtech/0,1000000183,39244663,00.htm

Probably one of the best ways I've found to deal with temp stuff (if you have enough ram) is to create a ram drive and throw your web cache, page file, and all temp files on there. At least that way when you reboot, they're all gone.

This method works great with Opera or Firefox, but as far as I know, Safari does not let you change the location of it's cache. In Opera, just type opera:config and then search for cache, in firefox, just type about:config and then it's a matter of adding a string to the config (google if you would like to know more).

Aside from keeping pesky temp files from building up, this also helps to cut down on disk fragmentation because many of your most modified files will now be isolated on a ram disk and ram doesn't really have any loss compared to a hard disk for fragmentation.

You dont need an addon to get you tube videos, lol, just some javascript knowledge or use the code on this link. (you can do this with more than just opera, firefox will work find with a bookmark as well).

I just make a user button in opera to grab the videos with that. Lets you do it in both .flv and .mp4 format.

We just had an article on this literally the other day

I'm shocked, 200 some posts and no one mentions the windows 95/98/2k start menu is now a thing of the past, totally taken out of explorer in Win7. Apparently everyone here hasnt really tried Win7 or they just don't use it. In my opinion, all the newer incarnations of the start menu were crap and "Why fix what isn't broken?"

I currently run VMware Workstation with an Intel Q6600. VMware has a setting to choose to use one or 2 of the cores. Generally, for Linux VMs, one core is enough (unless you decide on GUI). If one goes for Windows Vista/7, 2 is better for performance, but one works okay for XP.

Ram is dirt cheap right now on Newegg as well. I have 8gb of Corsair ddr2 ram I got for 50 dollars after rebates. Non GUI, you can get by with 384-512mb of ram, but otherwise, id go with at least 1024 or more.

The nicer part of VMware Workstation is it now supports Directx 9.0c (but with only shader level 2, still working on 3). Expect a 10 or so perecent in performance droppage though for gaming depending on how many resources you allocate.

Your needs look a bit bigger than mine (mostly trashing VMs and running test software before doing something crazy to the actual box). A bigger CPU such as a Xenon might be more to your liking, since you can have 2 of them for a total of 8 cores (leading to lots of VMs).