I tend to keep my old hard drives around several years and time to time I take a hammer and a big nail and render one or two oldest ones by hitting a nail through the case and platters. Excellent way to destroy data and vent frustrations.

What you are saying, reminds me of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_of_Columbus

Why they even bother salting roads when there is -12 degrees Celsius? Salting is only sensible when there is about -4 degrees (at least that is a rule of thumb here in Finland). Also, using fertilizers is so completely boneheaded move because that's plain and simple polluting. I guess that someone made a risk analysis and decided that polluting groundwater supplies causes less deaths than icy roads. But I can't help but wonder what the long-term effects are for environment and groundwater.

My eeePC does that same thing. The eeePC 901 jumps to GRUB in about second (haven't actually measured it, but it is fast).

But how dim they get over time? It's pretty pointless to have a LED light that lasts 19 years, if the light gets so dim after few years that it is practically unusable.

I only have one tip: label cables clearly at both end.

So it is not socially acceptable to just fork the code?

I can understand the aspect of upsetting people and alienating the community, but the whole concept of "people might not like taking their code" confuses me here. I have always assumed that when something has been released under open source license, that act in itself is some kind of agreement that the code can be forked at some stage.

Personally I have never forked anything, but I have released few pieces of code to public and I have always assumed that if someone likes my work and wants to take it and improve it or take it to some new direction, then by all means, just take the code and start a new project. Granted, I don't have a thriving community behind me, so there isn't this social aspect to consider.

It's interesting to see that there can be this whole social protocol around the open source software development world. For me this is interesting, because I have always assumed that programmers in general seem to swear on following the OS licence literally regardless on social impact.

Not necessarily commenting this particular case, just wondering in general...

Why is it that when someone is pondering on forking a project, quite often we see these questions asked? Is the OSS community so polite that we have to ask permission from peers to fork a project? Why not just fork it and see, if the project takes off? Or is it about insecurity? Are we just afraid of negative feedback from anti-forking people?

When I was reading the article, it was like I was reading this novel: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_(novel)

And here I thought that the Crichton book was just some random over-the-top science fiction. It's sometimes scary, when SciFi turns into reality.

It was 1989 when I got the PC. And yes, the C64 was very popular in Finland at that time (another popular system for home use was Amiga). It was a Nokia MikroMikko, which was mainly used at banking systems. This PC in question was from a construction company, which was upgrading to newer machines (to 30386, if I remember correctly). They had to get rid of these old ones, so they gave them to the employees. This is how I got the PC.

I don't know, what I have done, but I still have the classic Slashdot view with comment counts. In my preferences I have disabled the beta index feature and in Discussions: Viewing, I have Slashdot Classic Discussion System selected.

So much fond memories...

The Debug.exe was actually my first contact to programming and the first language I learned, was x86 assembler.

It was MS-DOS 2.xx and all my friends played with C64s and coded all kinds of cool things. My parents couldn't afford a C64 but they somehow got an old PC free. Demoscene was a new and hot thing in those days and me and my friend programmed our first demo completely using the Debug.exe. Merging the two code-bases was an interesting task, when all you had was two pieces of binary and some unused memory space for copy 'n' paste. The demo actually was quite cool. Unfortunately I have lost my only copy.

Really? At least my Vista installation still has it.

Every time, when I hear about these in-door satellite navigation systems, I can't help but wonder, how these even could work. First of all, AFAIK, the GPS signal is so faint that it will not work inside the buildings. Also, the accuracy of the mobile tower / GPS systems might not be enough for this kind of applications.

Genetic manipulation by some evil corporation or government!

That's what the world needs: religious fundamentalists that are also crackpot conspiracy theorists!