my first gui was geos on a c64, it wasn't mine and i didn't use it for too long. since this c64 had no mouse you controlled the cursor with the joystick. i was kind of impressed by it (first time ever seeing a gui, can you imagine), even though it was mono colored. perhaps some apps were able to use/display colors, the interface certainly wasn't.

though i voted for amiga, because it was the first gui capable machine i owned and it had an amazing gui (by todays standards not so much). the main thing was ofcourse the amazing multitasking the amiga was capable of within this gui.

Indeed, ID was one of the big producers that made native linux executables available for their games. Hence, i did not say 'version', but 'executables'. Because afaik you had to buy the windows version, then download the linux installer and run it on your purchased windows media.
Ofcourse their linux version never made any money, they were freely available on their ftp site, retail only had windows and how could they ever calculate how much of that sale was coming from linux users?
There only ever was Quake 3, from Loki, and i bought it. However it was a limited run, so how many windows versions were still sold for use on linux? nobody knows, even carmack doesn't.

I've seen and been in the concorde at the Duxford museum a few years ago too. The plane is wonderful to look at, a beauty. Until i went inside, the disappointment was so much greater. It looked ancient, old, outdated, uncomfortable...

python doctest ftw! - http://docs.python.org/py3k/library/doctest.html

you did that too?! haha, i wonder if there was anybody who didn't pull off this joke back in the day (i blame wargames as an inspiration to make that hoax).

That is the way all 'enterprise' licenses work. You pay a penalty when you run their software on bigger iron. Usualy the price goes up depending on one or a combination of: #cpu, #ram, #users, #data, etc.

There is no difference in the software what so ever, nothing! There is nothing stopping you from buying a license for a tier 1 while in fact you need tier 3 or something (the difference in price might easily be $100.000's!! depending on the software). Ofcourse, if they ever decide to audit you, or you open a support call (oh, yeah, the suppot costs goes up with the licensing cost as well) and you run some kind of diagnostic tool they will figure out you underpaid them and then the trouble starts.

The whole situation is scandalous, i can't believe people still buy this crap, keep paying for it, there are alternatives these days. It's easy to understand how MS made an impact back in the day, compared to most of those other companies they are almost nice guys.

This is not my expirience, at work the whole team has an identical laptop (dell latitude 800), the only difference being ofcourse that i'm using linux (ubuntu) while they are all on windows. Now, they are always the first to reach for their powercables while i'm still good.

Try these things:
* configure the power manager
* install powertop and check out some of the suggestions it makes
* check out /etc/laptop-mode/conf.d - it contains a bunch of config files, you can get a lot of benefit out of those.

Sure, by default you probably could get worse battery life compared to windows, and why isn't this done correctly to begin with yadda yadda... it is there, you can fiddle around with it, which for me is good enough at the moment. i'm sure one distro or another will finally get around it and make decent default settings. A year ago, suspend wans't working on my dell either, it does now, and does it very well. You can't tackle everything at once.

Also, don't forget that 'Independent tests show that Red Hat Linux pulls as much as 12% less power than Windows 2008 on identical hardware'