hell I sat in the back smoking while I worked.

Dude if my computer came back smelling like smoke, I'd be asking for a refund, as well as a replacement of every component that smelled like smoke.

Not that I would need to take any of my machines to a repair shop, but if I did, I'd take it to Geek Squad before I would take it into a place that reeked of smoke in the back room.

Totally willing to be modded off-topic here-- my karma can stand the hit.

I watched the episode on the Tesla. I think the only bad impression I did get from it was the mileage on the battery. Sure, they were driving the car hard, but the life span didn't seem up to par.

Since the car is based off of the Lotus Elise, people will buy it because it looks (and, in fact is,) sporty. As such, they're going to drive it with a bit of a lead foot, with hard take-offs, and perhaps even a bit more speed than an average driver on the roads. When you factor those two things in, I doubt you'll get the 200 mile range that they advertise-- probably more like 100, or less. In the Top Gear review, they got 55 miles under hard driving conditions, and then had to switch to their secondary car, which subsequently overheated and then had some major subsystem failure....

There are plenty of options out there for his particular circumstance, like AviMark:

http://www.avimark.net/

You can scale that up, and it runs on commodity hardware. Honestly, he's lucky that he got that setup to run so long... You could take a software package like what I just mentioned and put it on darn near anything that you want to run it on, older or newer. How many people in ANY field expect something like that to last 15 years?

..So does this mean the technology access fees are going to go down in schools, if they don't have to maintain these computer labs?

I doubt it!

Hah... actually, he walks away from you while still looking at you.

I shudder to think we could be starting a meme here, a la Chuck Norris...

...You're not playing devil's advocate here, I know, but I do just want to point out there's a big difference between saving THAT animal vs. attempting to re-create a copy of that animal.

If given a choice between paying $150k for cancer treatment for my dog, or paying $150k for a clone of that same dog, I'd choose paying for cancer treatment, even if the dog didn't recover from it.

If after all of that, I'd get another dog from a shelter. There are plenty of other good companions out there right now without me having to go and create a new life on this earth.

Heck, bull baiting, the practice of tying a bull to a post, then sicking attack dogs on it, was once mandatory in Great Britain. The reasoning behind the practice was that baited bull meat was considered to taste better.

Of course, this practice was banned, but it just goes to show you that there's nothing new under the sun.

One "cool" thing about Windows, if you can say that, is there are tools and hooks in the OS to monitor EVERY transaction on the system, from registry edits to disk reads/writes. You are totally right here-- Sophos probably used a tool like this on a "clean" system, installed the trojan, then generated what amounts to a diff of the system using such monitoring tools. Not much can get past such a tool when you have reference systems like they do for malware studies.

Yeah... but I think that's called vandalism.

I don't know if telecoms providers like this are subject to any type of laws about interfering with utilities, but I'm pretty sure even if you got the effect of decreasing uptime and causing them grief, you're probably going to wind up in some kind of serious legal trouble, and possibly be liable for the financial consequence of fixing those lines....

But how far did MkLinux get? I just checked that site, and it's still the same as it was nearly 8 years ago. Sure, the updated dates are the same, but they never did even come out with a 1.0 release.

Seems like maybe NeXT may have had a more stable platform than what Apple was working on in the form of MkLinux?