BTW, I created my /. account in 1996 in Mosaic on a DEC Alpha also running Slackware Linux.

I actually have always felt I kinda missed out in that I never used OS/2 - a friend of mine at the time had a box running Warp; I think I clicked on it maybe three times, ever.

Before Windows 3.1, most computers with a GUI that I used were running CDE. Mostly Sun workstations, but also a few Alpha and AIX boxes. And one SGI running IRIX. My first home computer with a GUI was Slackware Linux with FVWM. Unless you count the GEM desktop on a C64.

Windows WFW 3.11 - was pretty ok. First version of Windows I used daily. There were lots of useful, or perhaps too many necessary, hacks in the early days of the internet.

Windows 95 was, in my opinion, pretty cool, and obviously was a real game-changer in terms of UI.

Windows ME was a horrible aberration. Garbage. I only experienced it on friends-and-family computers I would get summoned to "repair". Usually pre-installed by HP on the horrible boxes they were selling at the time. Note: HP did, in my mind, redeem themselves years later and resume making real computers.

I worked with Windows NT 3.51 and 4 a bit at various workplaces, but for server OS, almost everything was already Linux even at that time (1999-2002 time frame).

Windows 2000 was fantastic. Rock-solid. I never ran XP at home, just stuck with 2000 because there was no compelling reason to "upgrade". For a home and small business OS, I really think MS nailed it with 2000.

Windows Vista took more of a beating than it deserved. I ran it at home for a couple of years and had no real complaints other than the UI was pretty ugly a lot of the time.

Windows 7 was and still is fantastic. I love it. My computer does exactly everything I need it to do, and is crazy stable. Less crashes than even with 2000, which almost never crashed ever, anyway. I really do love Windows 7. Currently in my house we have Macs running Mavericks, my Win 7 box, and I boot to Manjaro Linux on occasion to get some work done that I just don't find practical under Windows because I never learned Powershell.

I tried Windows 8.0 for a while and was absolutely shocked at what a disaster it was. Just unbelievable. I never tried 8.1, which I understand fixed things considerably, but as I said, I love Win 7 and like with the 2000 -> XP shift, see no compelling reason to upgrade.

I am honestly intrigued by Windows 10 and will give it a spin when the preview is actually available, so perhaps even later today.

(Can't believe I am bothering to post this)

This comment just made me shudder with the painful memories of writing web applications in Cold Fusion that used ADO to talk to MS Access files as the DB backend in like 1998. Ugh.

sudo yum update bash

Thank you for the quick warning.

Start here, Einstein and Infeld. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Physics

NewRelic is pretty sweet, as the parent says, even at the free tier. They will definitely bombard your email and phone with hard-sales pitches, though, and there's a giant cost leap from free to the next tier.

Sorry, but wrong on two counts:

1. That model motherboard uses the *exact* same UEFI and BIOS as mine (FM2A78M-HD+ - it is probably much older than the date I gave, which was its purchase date, sorry for any confusion) and just to make sure I wasn't making a misstatement, I flashed the BIOS and UEFI from the pre-bootloader interface this morning.

2. I do not upgrade often. I bought this computer with the Asrock this year because due to certain circumstances I was unable to bring my 2011 PC, which was an off-the-shelf HP from Best Buy (that I then upgraded substantially - I got such a deal on the base machine that it was less expensive than building a complete one), with me when I moved to Germany. Before that it had been at least five years since I bought a motherboard, and tended back then to run older budget hardware, because I am so far removed from a moneyed Apple fanboi.

The first "horror story" is specifically regarding flashing BIOS from Linux via USB. I don't understand how this is related to modern motherboards - in fact, I see it as an issue that is disappearing. This is a situation I have had on OLDER, pre-UEFI motherboards - the requirement to run an EXE from an installed version of Windows, rather than from a boot floppy that didn't care what OS was installed. Many (including my Asrock) modern mobos can update right from the UEFI system without even spinning up the boot drive.

The second is specific to power management on laptops (I will admit to tl;dr speed-reading here), which is clearly not what the OP is talking about.

Tempest in a teacup. The ONLY thing that doesn't work so well with my dual boot system with my July 2014 Asrock motherboard is enabling the accelerated boot system which just makes plain sense, as it relies on caching a booted state to disk to skip a lot of init. I was at first nervous about UEFI, having read a ton of FUD a couple of years back, but it really is a non-issue. If anything, I like the low-level system management on my Asrock better than the old Award/Phoenix dominated BIOS systems.

Take quoting Wikipedia with all the grains of salt you want, but I find this relevant and appropriate - Under Character Assassination -> In a Totalitarian Regime, we find:

"The effect of a character assassination driven by an individual is not equal to that of a state-driven campaign. The state-sponsored destruction of reputations, fostered by political propaganda and cultural mechanisms, can have more far-reaching consequences. One of the earliest signs of a society’s compliance to loosening the reins on the perpetration of crimes (and even massacres) with total impunity is when a government favors or directly encourages a campaign aimed at destroying the dignity and reputation of its adversaries, and the public accepts its allegations without question. The mobilisation toward ruining the reputation of adversaries is the prelude to the mobilisation of violence in order to annihilate them. Official dehumanisation has always preceded the physical assault of the victims."

But what do any of you know about his actions except what various media has told you? Were you there? Were you victimized by Assange? Do you personally know someone who was? If the answers to those questions is "no", then you really need to think about who you are trusting: Television and online reporting, from blogs to major outlets. I am browsing at -1 and have yet to see a single comment that is from someone that even speciously purports to have any personal knowledge of his actions.

Beware hearsay.

I see from the comments here that the governmental mission of character assassination of this fellow is largely complete and successful. Do you know Assange personally? Have you ever had dealings with him apart from seeing stories online and on TV about him? I don't and I haven't, and thus I don't pretend the biases against him that most people here seem to have been suckered into (nor do I have any bias toward him).

I don't find a coordinated corporate media campaign to ruin this guy unrealistic in the least, though.

You can't actually be serious? What? I like a good recliner myself, but as an Ask Slashdot this takes things to new lows.

From the replies on the linked blog post, people are having distro-specific successes / failures even after following the instructions. I can imagine this being anything from distro specific paths, to permissions on certain binaries that could be different for say, Fedora from Mint, to codec issues (though as I understand it with Chrome the codecs are all basically wrapped up in the binary?) The specific technical details of this situation are a bit out of my area of expertise but I don't think any of the things I guess at here are out of the realm of possibility.

Technical issues aside - I welcome this development. I know and understand completely that a lot of people have issues with DRM making it's way into the core HTML (5) specs, but I kind of see it as unavoidable if we want to enjoy commercial content without needing completely non-standard garbageware like Silverlight or Flash. I have used Netflix with the Compholio Wine / Pipelight stuff, and while it works, it struggles to do so.

Yeah, there is a slippery slope and lots of compromise - but I would have less reason to ever boot into Windows if my paid subscriptions to content that I enjoy could work natively under "Linux". And just don't ask me to stop watching movies or playing 3xA game titles, because I won't.

Because no matter how strongly they state that a configuration is not supported, if it's not expressly blocked, people will try to get technical support for it. And with the distro landscape as it is, supporting mainstream software on "Linux" is a nightmare.