Yeah, this will work. Money well spent gentlemen.

From McDonald's "Value Menu" you can order the following separately:

Medium drink - $1.00 (+ tax)
Double cheese burger - $1.20 (+ tax)
Small fries - $1.00 (+ tax)


You can order a "double cheese burger" combo meal for $2.79 (+ tax) which includes all of the above.

If you order the combo meal but do not want fries, do you really expect to receive a full $1.00 off? No, because the $2.79 price is discounted since it is part of a combo meal, even if the individual parts separately would cost more than $2.79. In this example, if you did not want fries, it would be cheaper to buy the drink + double cheese burger separately instead of purchasing the combo meal and excluding the fries.

The main problem with my analogy is while it is simple to buy a drink + cheeseburger separately, it is not as easy to buy computer parts without an OS. Desktops are highly customizable, but laptops/portables/etc are difficult to find in either barebones, diy kits, or individual parts.

Which is exactly what you sign when you lease a car. :)

You do not "own" proprietary software; you license it.

If I buy a Ford, I can't start throwing SAAB suspension parts and Volkswagon exchaust with a Honda engine in it. Doesn't work like that.

That is a retarded statement. Something more accurate would be "spark plugs/oxygen sensors/etc I bought for my Ford won't work in my friend's SAAB."

Of course saying that is also retarded, since spark plugs/oxygen senros/etc are not brand-specific and you can buy them for some Fords that will work in some SAABs.

With a bit of mechanical knowledge, you could also equip a Ford with a VW exhaust if you wished. There is nothing in the paperwork you signed with Ford legally binding you from doing this with the vehicle you purchased. If you leased the vehicle, you would have signed a document preventing you from doing this.

Going back to the software world, this is really an argument about whether or not you own your licensed copy of a particular piece of software. If you own it, you should be able to do whatever you want. If you only own the right to use it, than you should follow certain regulations.

At the end of the day, though, computers!=automobiles, so these analogies only go so far.

That is why it is fun to walk around your office from time to time looking for passwords on post-it notes and arbitrarily change a few letters.

3's are easy to change to 8's, 1's to 4's, C/c's to O/o's, etc.

Pretty funny to watch a user pull their hair out when the password they wrote down isn't working. I've managed to scare a few people into not writing their password down this way.

Microsoft's AV is decent, works well enough, and may push some AV vendors out of business. Where is the problem here? If {insert AV vendor here} can't compete in their own market, then they have no business here in the first place.

The only problem I see is if Microsoft's AV is decent, they work just enough to push other AV vendors out of business, then stop development on their product. (similar to IE5) But this isn't really a problem since it would just cause a brief fall (AV vendors pushed out of market) and rebirth of the AV market (AV vendors come back strong if Microsoft stagnates), not a major ordeal. This would actually be good for the security market.

I think you can safely remove the tinfoil hat. I don't see either one of these outcomes as bad. AV software is one layer to computer security. Any security plan that depends solely on AV software is not much of a plan.

Because Linux is just a kernel, it is rather trivial to take Linux, bolt on some programs, and call it a "new distribution." The design philosophy of Linux enables and encourages this kind of behavior.

The major BSD systems (FreeBSD*, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and DragonflyBSD) have all been carefully designed from the original 386BSD codebase. Originally, there were just FreeBSD and NetBSD, based off of the 386BSD codebase. Developer conflicts within NetBSD caused a split, spawning OpenBSD. A similar thing happened in FreeBSD, spawning DragonflyBSD. I will not go into details as you can research that for yourself, but this is how we got from 386BSD to where we are now. Keep in mind that there was a rather large uproar in the NetBSD community before OpenBSD was created; it was certainly not done on a whim.

Most *BSD developers believe their time is better spent working on new problems than re-inventing old problems. Why take 10 developers and spread them out, all to work on their own version of X when together they could collectively build X, Y, and Z. This is not always the case (see the NetBSD conflict which spawned OpenBSD), but for the most part this is the reason you do not see hundreds of *BSD variants.

As I said earlier, it is relatively easy to bolt together your own Linux distribution. In fact, something like LFS can have a complete novice building his own "distribution" in a very short time span. Basically, anyone can make their own distro. What about *BSD? Could a complete novice take FreeBSD, fork it, and make his own JoeBSD variant? Yes, but he wouldn't get very far. Unless he knew what he was doing and had a good knowledge of the code, most of the *BSD crowd would simply ignore his efforts. Not because they're mean, coldhearted, etc., but because they aren't going to waste time on JoeBSD when it is a fork of FreeBSD, which still works perfectly fine.

If JoeBSD brought something genuinely new to the table, people would support it. If JoeBSD was just a copy of FreeBSD with a different package manager, people would ignore it. *I did not include DesktopBSD or PCBSD because they are not separate derivatives, they are FreeBSD with easy-to-use installers and pre-configurations. Think Ubuntu and Xubuntu.

The DragonFly BSD project is one I have followed with great interest. I am a long time Free and Open BSD user, and DragonFly has brought a lot of new ideas to the table.

I'm glad to see another fine release by their team. It is really amazing what just a handful of people have accomplished with DragonFly. Great work guys!

Since when did people start considering P4 machines "old?" I can do almost everything on my P4 desktop that I can do on my Core2Duo laptop, save for some higher-end graphics rendering. The P4 chip is not slow, by any means. P3, sure. but P4? Please. Kids today are incredibly spoiled. Get off my lawn, etc etc.

Related to the topic, it would be trivial to configure console login via the serial port. Since this P4 is so "old," it should have a serial port. OpenBSD provides an option for serial login during the install. Many linux distributions do as well.

I have read too many /. comments about the "shaky cam" making people dizzy and people getting sick from the gore. What a bunch of panzies!

This is an awesome film. It is less gore-filled then most recent horror flics and the "shaky cam" is no where near as bad as everyone seems to think it was. The shaky camera scenes do a good job of adding to explosions and other noise in the environment. Also, remember this film was partially shot as a "documentary," so some of the shakiness was the fake camera man being thrown about (like when they were filming hut-to-hut).

You are certainly entitled to not like this film; everyone's tastes are different. But if you thought it was too gory, you threw up, it made you sick, or it made you dizzy....you have some issues.

I loved the movie and thought that overall it was an excellent film.

Who would -want- to use a copy of Unix? Unix was a terrible operating system that had a few good ideas that were poorly implemented. The unix-releated systems we have today: Linux, *BSD, OSX, Solaris, HP-UX, etc are all huge improvements over original Unix implementations.

Linux is not a copy of Unix. Linux was originally designed to be a free alternative to Minix. Saying "Linux started out as a Minix clone" is more accurate than "Linux is a copy of Unix." Keyword: started. Linux started out as a clone of Minix, but has evolved into its own niche. Compare Minix-3 to Linux-2.6.*.

You obviously have not worked with many developers. I personally know some very bright developers, but I have also met my fair share of developers who are complete morons when it comes to basic administrative tasks. Maybe all that code turns your brain to mush. Maybe its a disease. Whatever.

Don't even get me started about dealing with employees/clients/customers. Sysadmins get put through hell and are expected to keep a cool head. Most developers get hot way to easy. ;)

Not all sysadmins could be developers. Not all developers could be sysadmins.

You can talk about "eye of the beholder" and "we have different standards for beauty" all you want, but it is mostly garbage. Today's women are more "beautiful" than past generations just like they live longer now than past generations.

In the decade 1911-1920, non-Latino Whites had an average life expectancy of 51.5 years. In the US today, non-Latino Whites are expected to live until age 78. This is a dramatic increase in a single century.

Look at pictures of your grandfather from his 20's and compare that to pictures of your father in his 40's.

I believe women could be seen as "more beautiful" today because the life we live is easier. A lot of hard, manual labor (which stresses the body and causes aging to happen quicker) has been replaced with computer-controlled machines. Yes, we still have to do "hard" work, but we can -drive- home to a nice, air-conditioned house, pop open a cold drink, and throw some frozen meal (which contains growth-hormones!) into the microwave to eat.

The growth hormones in our food most certainly plays a role. There is a surprising number of young girls that have very large breasts, as compared to the past couple of decades. How many teen girls back in the 70's had C or D cups? How about today?

Cosmetic surgery, breast augmentation, etc all play a role as well. How many girls in LA or Miami have real, un-altered breasts?

That would work great until the moisture buildup from the water kills all the electronic equipment in the room. ;)

I attend a small community college that uses Blackboard. My laptop runs FreeBSD + Firefox with Sun's java v1.6. I've never had any problems retrieving assignments, uploading homework, or communicating with instructors.