That's what I don't understand. I mean a large number of games aren't marketed to any major extent. They send out copies to be reviewed and maybe buy some banner ads, but they don't do TV spots or anything. Of those that are marketed in a larger fashion, most seem to be marketed as, well, games. There isn't a gender bias I can see. It is just "Here is a game where you can do X. Look at the pretty graphics. Buy it."

I guess I don't see what is needed here. Do women need things specifically targeted at them? Must the ad say "Hey ladies, this is a game for you,"? That doesn't seem to be useful because it only acts to segregate. It says "You girls aren't good enough for most games, here's a special one for you." To me it seems that the message needs to be that games are for everyone, all games. Your gender doesn't determine what you can do for fun.

I'm honestly interested in what you think they need to do to market to women. What about current game marketing fails? What sort of thing is needed to attract women?

Your second point isn't 100% right, modern tape drives have two features that more or less eliminate "shoe-shining". The first is that the tape drive can usually run at multiple speeds, sometimes as low as 1/3 of it's headline speed so if you can't keep up it adjusts. But the most important feature is a huge buffer, several seconds of write time between the OS and the tape surface. With both of these in place the "shoe-shining" is minimal. (eg: a quarter second backtrack every 5 seconds; as compared to the old QIC drives where you could easily end up with the equivalent of twenty passes.)

PS: If you happen to have an old tape drive that doesn't have a huge buffer it can easily be done in software.

gigabit-equipment is dirt-cheap nowadays.

Gigabit cabling isn't. Or to be more precise, ripping up the carpets and skirting boards in the living room and bedroom without the wife noticeing and complaining isn't an option.
So, no gigabit for me, until the wife discovers something that she wants to do that saturates the network. And I don't think that's going to happen in the foreseeable future - I think we'll move to a different country first and I'll cable in gigabit or 10gig directly.
To be honest though - I've not encountered anything apart from backing up the file server where 100-base-T is a limitation. And the file server I backup by hooking the USB drives to it, then telnetting in and running the process natively on the box itself.
(Wireless? Meh. Tempest isn't a worry; wireless security holes are a worry; and I have to maintain explosives compatibility on my machines. Who needs it?

It is not that a good CEO can contribute 200x as much as us, more that a bad CEO can destroy much more than 200x as much and the high pay is seen as insurance against that.

True, I have had zero problems with Windows XP / ntfs and Linux in recent years. But what about Windows 7's ntfs? I've upgraded from XP to Windows 7 and I have found that Ubunut Karmic has problems accessing *some* of the directories on the ntfs-filesystems.

Another thing, will windows 7 "enhance" my external HD's ntfs so that I won't be able to acccess it from Linux? The external HD is mostly a storage/backup disk but I use it occasionally to transfer files to Windows 7.

RHEL5, released March 14, 2007, uses Python 2.4.3, which was released March 29, 2006. Given a reasonable package-freeze/testing/bugfix cycle, using this version seems about right. Also, Python 2.5.0 was released September 19, 2006 -- I know I wouldn't want to make a potentially major jump for all my system tools before publishing a major distro release.

Perhaps you should rethink the presentation of your point next time -- given what you've said already concerning RHEL5 and Python2.4, you should also be saying "RHEL5 uses Linux 2.6! That was released back in 2003!!!! ZOMG!!!"

In re: Python 3 migration, moving to the Python 3 series presents FAR bigger issues than addon-distribution, namely the changing and/or removal of some particularly widely-used items from Python 2.

I will agree with you that distribution of third-party modules can be annoying in Python, but that's not necessarily the Python developers' problem. Why should they be implicitly responsible for something that is third-party? Just because another platform is doing it? C'mon, that's a flimsy argument at best.

You've spent years learning Windows. What's a week to learn Linux?

Buddhist cultures like Thailand or Cambodia, the reincarnation religions combined with life being cheap, easy for them to justify what we westerns consider absolutely stupid behaviour (Driving is the first thing that comes to mind) with "it OK, I come back, next life".

I guess that depends on an individual's perspective, but the general consensus among Buddhists I've spoken to is that one should consider themselves very fortunate to be born a human, as it is in this form we have one of the rare opportunities to achieve enlightenment and break the perpetual cycle of rebirth and suffering. Depending on how you lived your life, the chances of just "coming back" next life are very slim.

You are correct. From http://www.apple.com/xserve/specs.html:

Optional Xserve RAID Card with 256MB cache and 72-hour cache battery backup; support for RAID 0, 1, and 5

I'm an iPhone owner, and I've dropped mine on concrete about on 3 different occasions and while it has a few scratches on the back, it still works perfectly fine. I think it all depends on exactly how you hit it. I don't really have any doubt that BBs are a bit tougher, but iPhones aren't that fragile.