Depends on what you mean by rednecks. A lot of the folks up here (upstate NY) who proudly call themselves rednecks have quite a lot of mechanical knack - including understanding of mechanical forces, loads, etc., physics, chemistry.. After all, if you're going to build a dirt track race car out of an old Caddy, you need to make sure it will hold together in a wreck. Same with improvised explosives, homemade ammunition, etc. Are they all like this? No. However, many are, and the ones that are tend to be mechanics, machinists, and compulsive putterers and tinkerers.

Have a look at the DSG gearbox from VW/Audi/Porsche. It's essentially a double-clutched manual w/ an automatic shifting bit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct-Shift_Gearbox

I'm waiting for 10.04.1 and will likely standardize on that until next LTS.

Will save the bleeding edge for VMs.

The alternate install also fails to do Software RAID correctly.

While in installer, pre first boot: /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1
(combined to /dev/md0, as /boot) /dev/sda2 /dev/sdb2
(combined to /dev/md1 as LVM)

After first boot (well, not even, because /boot doesn't mount) /dev/md0 is not started /dev/md1 is comprised of /dev/sda and /dev/sdb

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/debian-installer/+bug/563343

I took my 200's in 1999.. the last year they were taught in C.

I know it does. A friend got one for her birthday once, with explicit instructions to don it immediately.

The remote was passed around the party.

She soon developed an amusing twitch in her conversations...

Yes, you are misinterpreting the intent. As Heller vs. DC held, the keeping and bearing of arms is *not* explicitly connected to militia service.

I always turned in PDFs generated in LaTeX. I got points because mine were visibly easier to read (better font rendering and layout) than Office at the time (2000-ish).

There are modern tools which make using LaTeX to do documents even more nicer. Where I had input, output + perl glueing it together, now there are IDE-type setups, with completion, etc.

absolutely.

Yeah, I've been wanting one of these for awhile.

In my (admittedly geek) household, every adult has:
  - a desktop
  - a fullsize laptop
  - a portable computing device (netbook, iPhone, etc.)

The desktop is for the things that the laptop can't do. The portable device is more portable than the laptop. As laptops get better, so do desktops, so they tend to leapfrog each other.

Last time I checked, Raid 1 was fault tolerant.

Because I've yet to see a 13" latitude w/ > 1600 horizontal resolution. I do, however, have a 1680x1050 screen in my thinkpad. However, it's more convenient to carry a netbook the random places which I visit.

I have a slightly different take on this - I view them as two different applications.

A netbook is a light, portable computing device for doing email and web whilst on the road. I do very little else with it.

My laptop is so that I have enough screen resolution, disk space and CPU horsepower to run VMs and do development while sitting on the couch or on a client site.

My desktop is for when I need even more resolution, CPU horsepower, or memory than my laptop can provide. That said, I mainly use it for storage, and am actually going to be moving the services it provides to the household (CUPS, Trac) to a desktop atom board, and then it will spend most of its time asleep. I'll WOL it when I need it (either from the Trac server or my laptop), and possibly have the BIOS start it up at midnight to download podcasts, and then let it go back to sleep when idle for too long.

Yeah, because the Aussies who wanted to keep guns all moved to the US.