... but it's not unusually cold. This is what the weather is like in the UK. Spring is a fairly unpredictable time of year, in a part of the world where the weather is generally unpredictable.

A couple of years ago we had weeks of -25ÂC weather during the winter, but in the last two it barely got below freezing. This winter, of course, it's going to be back to really cold, or maybe it's going to be back to really warm, or maybe just kind of middling with lots of rain.

My main desktop machine for poking about with sound is a Dell Optiplex 755 with a "laptop-style" floppy drive. The Intel floppy controller works really well for weirdass formats like the Ensoniq Mirage with its mixed sector lengths, and disks like the Roland S-series ones where the low-level format is "normal" but the filesystem is weird.

What old musical equipment do you need to create floppies for?

In 1996, Linux was way, way easier to use than the early days - by that point Debian Buzz and Rex had come out with a nice installer and good docs.

Servers don't really need "fancy guis", but it's nice if your desktop looks good and works well. No, screeds and screeds of tiny pixelly black text doesn't look good. It's especially not good for Real Work things, like PCB design and writing documentation that Normal People are expected to read.

Exactly. The dubstep kiddies are Doing It Wrong. If you want bass, you need a pipe organ.

You can get broadcast-quality audio out of suitably-balanced telephone lines...

I know, but it's one more thing to care about, and I don't want to have to care about it. I want to stick a disk in the machine (or these days, a USB flash drive), hit the power button, maybe press a couple of keys and come back in 15 minutes to a working usable computer. I want this to happen every time, and I want it to happen with the minimum of fuss. Furthermore, I want it to continue happening when I update, without having to edit PKGBUILDs and compile stuff - never mind having to explain to "normal people" how to do all that.

I don't understand the mentality that leads people to thin that making stuff complicated means you're somehow "learning how to really understand Linux". You're not. You're learning how to type error messages into Google and read the answers on the forum or the wiki. You still don't understand the problem or the solution, but at least you know what magic spell to utter to make the problem go away. Now that's fine if you want to start looking deeper into how and why what you did worked, and you *can* base a lot of learning that way. Back in the olden days, before even Debian, before quick and easy installers like the one Arch has, that's how we used to do it.

There's no excuse for that now, though. Stick Ubuntu on, and get some work done ;-)

I don't care about customising stuff, beyond maybe setting the mouse tracking speed and desktop background. I want to get work done, not dick about with settings.

Right, but the thing that killed it for me was when they broke avr-gcc to an astonishing degree and the package maintainer refused to admit there was a problem. In fairness the breakage was upstream, but the maintainer wanted to package the newest and greatest, and that was broken - so I had to roll my own one-version-older package that then conflicted with a bunch of stuff.

It would be great if there was a version of Arch that wasn't rolling-release. Maybe there is, and I just don't know about it.

And a bunch more times, and I *like* Arch. I still switched back to Ubuntu for my primary desktop and laptop though, because Arch seems to spend half its time broken in some weird and mysterious way because of an inadequately-tested package somewhere.

Another thing that people seem to have missed is that since it's going for ethanol production instead of food, it can be grown on really badly contaminated land. The waste from making ethanol can either be composted or just ploughed straight back in - and if you're really clever, you'll extract whatever was contaminating the land while you make the ethanol.

Bung some clover on it to start with and then plough that straight in the year you plant your sugar beet, and you're good to go.

I hope the irony of you posting that as an Anonymous Coward isn't lost on you ;-)

I don't "fear to go" to Pycon, I'm not going because it has a very high risk of serious negative consequences. I won't pish on a sparkplug either, not because I'm afraid to but because it's a stupid idea that's likely to end up with me getting hurt.

Pycon are allowing a dangerous and unhealthy environment build up. I avoid those at work, where the danger is real and physical like working in confined spaces or near unprotected roof edges. I avoid them in social situations, for similar reasons.

You've got to get it *seriously* hot for the alcohol to vapourise like that. If you're cooking something in a wine sauce, then the alcohol won't boil off. Ethanol boils at roughly 79ÂC (watch slashdot make an arse of the degree symbol) which is way, way hotter than you'd cook your sauce at.

No, the guy in question was fired because some whiny moron decided to make a big thing about pretending to be offended about something she heard while eavesdropping on a private conversation.

Adria Richards is a silly little ninny and really needs to take a good long hard look at herself.

Certainly not if my job can be put at risk because some attention-seeker decides to be offended by an innocent remark I make in a private conversation that they happen to overhear.

I don't care if you're offended. There's a bunch of stuff that offends me but you don't hear me whining on about it, because I'm a grown-up and I have learned that other people think differently from me.

If you don't drink alcohol, then you could - as others have already said - look at the label, or ask the kid stacking shelves in the wine section of the supermarket. You're a geek, you're supposed to know stuff and want to find out *more* stuff.

Chances are though, if you don't drink wine then you won't necessarily want to cook a recipe that involves wine. Many people who don't drink alcohol for religious reasons don't eat things cooked with wine or beer because of the alcohol content - and no, the alcohol *doesn't* boil off.

Of course, if you don't drink wine because you just don't like it, it's quite likely you won't like the taste of a thing cooked with wine. In that case, you should probably stick to bland stuff and go back go Burger King or Nando's.