I guess both titles will need some decent HW vendor support first (FFB for my logitech G25 wheel and drivers for the HOTAS Cougar Stick).

Totalitarian agriculture as outlined in the books by Dan Quinn: http://www.ishmael.org/

I've been trying to find some good schematics for an ipod dock to analog audio in connector for those compact hifi boxes, has anyone been successful in buying or building one him- or herself? All I'd need is to feed analog audio into the system, no fancy play controls and the like. Thanks!

15 mins on the bike to train station, about 20 minutes on the train followed by a 5 minute walk from the station to the office...

Another thumbs up for bacula if you need more than a single backup of your data (like copying it to drives only once)

What about the Dragon64? While it didn't have much software available, C64 owner's jaws dropped to the floor when the saw the floppy loading speed... parallel for the win! ;-)

I've been using Linux for quite a while (since 1992 or thereabouts) both for work and gaming and have had good results with NV hardware.

However the latest drivers (301.xx or thereabouts) run the 8800gt's fans at full speed even after the system boots, which seems to be a bug affecting quite a few other users across all major distributions.

This should have come from the "what-could-possibly-go-wrong" dept.... voice-activated desktop actions, GAWD help us all ;-)

Me too, is this a sign of getting / already being old? ;)

I don't think it's money that draws you into IT in the first place; if it is, it's probably a bad incentive as money can only do so much to make you happy.

What drew me into IT was passion for the subject, and I do believe that the only way you can possibly do a job for a lifetime is if you're passionate about it.

So while a bigger paycheck *may* be effective in bringing brighter people into the field, they'll probably be as ruthless in their craving to maximize their income as they'd be in other lines of better-paid work (you mentioned security traders, for instance, I'm not sure I'd want those for colleagues ;-))

+1 for Django from my end, too. It can be a bit complex at times if you still know what CGI is and are used to code your web pages accordingly, but once you've got going with it it can be amazingly flexible and powerful.

Also, the built in "admin" will save you a ton of work down the road.

I'm not a full-time developer mind you, but the people I've heard good things about Django from are right up there with the best of them as far as development skills go in our company.

me too, I hate talking on the phone or having the damn thing ring when I'm in the middle of something else. I have my office phone set to the lowest possible ring tone volume (sadly it's not possible to have it just beep once like the old ones we used to have), and my mobile phone is usually muted, too except when I'm on call (for two nights about once a month).

For work, about 90% of my stuff is organized through email, and people complaining of too many useless emails probably haven't used a decent mail client like mutt or discovered procmail yet and are still stuck with outlook or some other gui-only atrocity.

+100 if I had mod points, well said Sir.

While I believe the climate is changing (look at Earth's history, glaciers, tropical rainforest alternating through the ages), I believe the current hype about "us having to do something about it!1!1!!eleventy" is just another scheme to keep people afraid of something and keep them in line. Ice age in the 70s, nuclear war in the 80s, terrorists in the 90s and beyond... I'm simply too tired to feel afraid of anything anymore.

I do my best to protect the environment, but that's basically all I can do... no need to panic about things that are beyond my capability to change.

Not all cultures on earth treat (or more importantly) have treated the earth as just another asset to exploit to the best of our abilities, but sadly as a result, our culture is in the large majority now which promotes the idea of "men above all else", and humans not being subject to or part of the ecosystem just like the birds and the bees. "Ishmael" by Dan Quinn (yeah I know, I keep mentioning that book) has an extremely valid explanation of "how things came to be this way", better than anything else I've read.

Read it, but be warned, it may change the way you view our culture *forever*.

All the best, Uwe

Dan Quinn has some very insteresting ideas you might want to check out:

http://www.ishmael.org/

Basically, it's all about food production. Once we freeze the yearly food production output at the current amount, population growth will stop. No extra famines or revolts (we're having those already, remember?).

His Book "The Story of B" contains a great analogy about the reproduction among mice.

Ascension in 2k moves? Incredible. I've been playing nethack since the late 80s / early nineties and haven't even managed to find the damn wizard (and if I found him, he'd probably kill me ;-)