Having just lost my wife to a 16-hour-per-day WoW addiction, I finally realized after the past two years that if they don't want to help themselves there's nothing you can do for them. I tried everything I could think to do, and every attempt to "save" her only made her more angry and resentful which fed the addiction even more. Finally I just put my foot down and said "no more" - and she left.

Unfortunately I've found that my story is all too common lately. I've had family members that were hopelessly addicted to street drugs and alcohol - and this is no different. Same behavior, same problem. They even show physical symptoms of addiction, and go through withdrawal when it's not available to them.

I think we're all in for a whole new world of things to be addicted to as more options are available to technologically "escape reality". I wouldn't be surprised if within 10 years gaming and "virtual reality" addiction are an epidemic out of control.

I wish you and your friend all the best, and hopefully he snaps out of it and gets help. Don't push him and don't give him any more cause to be resentful - just be there for him when he decides to come back to Earth.

Windows Userisms:

"More functionality means less performance."
"You should buy a new computer for your new operating system."
"Accessing a floppy drive means nothing else will respond until the floppy is done."
"Number one thing you'll need for your new PC is antivirus software."
"More hard drives means more drive letters."
"You'll need another license for that."
"Any time you change something on your machine, you'll need to reboot."
"Just ignore those error messages, they pop up all the time."
"It's typical to pay $1000 for hardware and $3000 for software."
"Oh I know why that's broken, yesterday was patch Tuesday."
"Windows won't let you do that."

It's amazing the things that Windows users view as "normal".

I just did a vmware install of it and uname shows 7.2-PRERELEASE. I wonder if that was a last minute thing.

I'm pretty sure it's based on 7.2 PRE, not 7.1. The summary also makes it look like the software manager is a new feature, which it is not. The PBI system has been around for a while in PC-BSD.

On financial Microsoft problems:
"We want to make it absolutely clear that this is not a crisis of mismanagement,"

- Steve Ballmer
(aka the guy who manages Microsoft)

I dunno, I think there are enough script kiddie contests. I want to see more real hacker contests - like where the winner actually finds a new exploit, or even one where the winner fixes an exploit and provides a patch.

Even though you're whining, you know that 95% of the time, it is the system drive on a windows machine. If you're working tech support, and someone comes up and tells you their c: just exploded, then you're going to know what they mean. And don't even try to argue that you think it's a floppy drive, that's just plain silly. Who even uses those anymore?

Whether or not C: is always the system partition or not is irrelevant to my point. I was just pointing out the benefits of the "UNIX way" of naming and using block devices. Like I said, /dev/hda3 tells me it's the 3rd partition on the first (drive 0) drive in the system, and that it's most likely IDE. C: tells me nothing of the sort, just like D: or E: or Z: or AAAA:. The "Windows way" also lacks quick and easy ways to directly access the block device, just as it lacks quick and easy ways to mount any device at any point in the directory hierarchy.

What's wrong with good ole c:? Whenever you read it, you know exactly what the person is talking about. If you go with hda3 or somesuch, you're not going to know if you're talking about a swap file or what have you. Linux is unnecessarily complicated on this point. I've gone through hell trying to get my flash drive working on different linux machines at work because they aren't set up to mount sda volumes or somesuch. Then I couldn't fix the problem because the only guy who knew the su password was out of town. Went home early that day -- so I guess it wasn't all bad. /dev/hda3? Why that's the 3rd partition on the first hard drive in the system, of course.

What's wrong with C:? What is C:? What is E:? Is it a mapped drive? Is it a floppy? CD-ROM? Is it my USB keyring? C: isn't always the system drive on your Windows machine - I've had systems that for whatever reason had the G: or D: drive as the system drive. What do you mean C: isn't actually the drive itself? What do I do if I need to access the block device directly? What do you mean...

If I were a carpenter I'd
Hammer on my piglet, I'd
Collect the seven dollars and I'd
Buy a big prosthetic forehead
And wear it on my real head

Everybody wants prosthetic
Foreheads on their real heads
Everybody wants prosthetic
Foreheads on their real heads

No, but after my wife read that comment I might as well be. :wq!

I guess it's all a matter of preference. Right now my glibc is washing the dishes, which is great since my wife won't. However, in some other house they might want glibc to stay the hell out of the kitchen.