i find it hilarious that slashdot documents all these major breaches of the firewall, and subsequent "ha ha china has a stupid oppressive government, praise capitalism" type comments, but is not blocked by the firewall itself.

ports are just a way to build packages for 3rd party (i.e. not in the base system) software.

unlike a lot of operating systems, openbsd includes apache, bind, and other common network servers in the base install.

there's no automated upgrade procedure that works well for the openbsd base system at all; but there's a manual procedure, which is well documented, for upgrading between major versions

as someone has tried to upgrade many major linux distributions in various environments, i can tell you that manually is the ONLY way to do a proper system upgrade on a critical system; and many complex package management systems can hinder such an effort

openbsd people seem to shy away from binary packages for the most part, and most people that upgrade end up using a full source tree of the system to do so. in fact, openbsd is a bit unique in that they don't have an official binary patch mechanism. security patches to the base system are also generally intended to be done on a virgin openbsd source tree.

it's a weird way of doing things, for the average administrator, but it's a niche operating system, so if you don't like doing things the slow (but reliable) way, openbsd is not for you.

i have gone to great lengths to isolate my drives from the chassis of my systems to improve noise level (using rubber isolation mounts, shock cords, whatever)

the fact that the drive itself would not have as much mass holding it stationary never really entered into my decision making process... i just checked, and they do produce a substantial amount of vibration during seeks

perhaps i should have done some benchmarks

although the results are still slightly fitered, you are searching incorrectly.

the chinese people refer to the tiananmen square protest as the june fourth incident.

of course, tons of servers still run the 1.3 and 2.0 branches

these people don't care if they're in active development - and almost all of them are running them because upgrading isn't worth it for their application.

all these people care about are security patches. as long as that keeps happening, depreciate them all you want

it's just like people running 2.2.x kernels on high uptime servers. they don't want new features - if they were willing to install a new version of something every time a new feature came out, they'd be running 2.6.x now anyway. but they'll keep using it as long as reliability and security fixes keep rolling out.

but automatic updates are not disabled by WGA

i was working on a machine yesterday that had failed the WGA check, as soon as it was plugged back into the network, it began downloading security patches.

ironically, most users of pirated copies of windows completely disable automatic updates - for fear that it will "phone home" or install a newer copy of the WGA software that will defeat their cracks/workarounds.

it is access to microsoft's windows update site, as well as some of the material on downloads.microsoft.com that becomes unavailable after a WGA check.

if you manage to smokescreen your online identity with huge amount of positive material that bears your name (i.e. get your name on a lot of popular projects), with lots of cross linking, you will at the very least bury it into non-existance as far as search engines are concerned.

if it's result number 999 on google, i doubt your average employer will read that far into it, and if they do, the amount of positive things that have been said about you will probably outweigh the one negative result

and i'm not sure of US law in this manner, but is it legal to deny someone a job opportunity based on an alleged crime for which they were completely pardoned?

i don't know about that.

if you look through the alsa's driver list, you will find many professional-grade multi-channel interfaces.

the alsa project has brought support for some excellent professional interfaces - with a few exceptions, like motu (to me, motu have always been the tops for midi, but definitely not the best dacs out there)

a couple of layla 3Gs work great under linux for me, unfortunately the production software i want just isn't there.

i wouldn't say they're targetting linux first it for the hell of it..

many horrible "our first opengl software project" FPS games target linux initially, and for good reason

people expect so much less out of linux games, as there simply isn't much good entertainment software available to them. linux gaming addicts end up appreciating any peice of shit game they can get their hands on

windows users laugh at you when you release a work in progress, or something that is simply a peice of shit, as they're used to commercial grade game releases. that can be very hard to compete with, considering the development time that goes into even a passable 3d game.

so if your game sucks (or is in "permanent alpha"), guess where your largest audience is going to be