I don't have children and I'm not a teacher but instinctively I would attempt an analogy with books. Hoping they have at least read fictional books. I would start by avoiding all computer terms and simply explain the process of writing a book. How pieces of the book are usually written separately and then assembled and re-arranged until it becomes the awesome story you immerse yourself in.

Once they understand this concept switching the analogy to computer programming would be simple in my mind, but I don't have the mind of a 2nd grader. I think it's important to avoid the magic of computers, because they are truly magic to most of us, while books are tangiable and everyone can start writing but not everyone can make a good book. Much like programming.

I think it's unlikely, and not just because the Universe is huge and travelling at the speed of light is a paradox. (not a scientist) Simple social observations, we have free will, our free will creates great works of art, science, invention, engineering, we think outside the box because we have unique perspectives on life. Just like all things, this comes with a downside. The downside is of course that not all of us think about art when we think outside the box, some think about murdering people and exploiting them for their resources. So to assume that an alien race where they have achieved the goals of intergalactic space travel through free thought and innovation, the idea that this alien race would think we were more evil than them because we wage wars and kill each other is laughable. Because if they have the same free will, the same free innovation and free thinking free spirited individuals as we do then they would by that logic have the same evil, the same murders and the same exploitation.

I in fact made the switch to Opera when I was using a Thinkpad with 256MB RAM and 1.6GHz CPU. Firefox, though having worked well for two product names back in its timeline, had suddenly started crashing a lot after a certain update. So I gave Opera a chance and was blown away but the stability. I never restarted my browser anymore, it just stayed on with all my tabs saved in it. And if it did close for some reason, it had already saved my tab session flawlessly. I was sold. However, shortly after I came into money and started buying all Mac computers, I switched to FF and now I run FF4.

I work with Swedish and Danish customers, and at work we have an American supervisor so most of my co-workers speak Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and English.

Also I'm originally from the Balkans so I speak those three languages too.

Wow, that felt good, hold on while i deflate my ego.

I don't care, as a proud Mac OS X user I really don't care if Apple is acting just as evil as every other major corporation of that size.

I don't pretend to understand what it takes to run a company that size, I judge the product I want to use and right now that is Mac OS X which I find much more suitable for every most daily work I do than Microsoft Windows for example.

Don't get me wrong though, I still think people should keep an eye on them and expose these things, it won't affect my choice in operating system or computer though.

I find this very interesting because what it shows is that if you place a donut that costs $1 and another that is free before a person, they will without a doubt take the free one. Moral of the story is that piracy will always exist, no matter how strong the DRM is. What Steam is doing is a great thing, but for games! It's much easier to pirate something you only have to see or hear to enjoy. I believe piracy is a problem and i would never legalize it. But what about legalizing non-commercial distribution of media? Imagine it, you could run a torrent tracker, but you're not allowed to have any sort of income from it. This would lead to small private groups of sharing people, sort of like DC-hubs or private torrent trackers but without the public invites and registrations. We could never stop piracy, but at least make it acceptable in smaller forms and focus on bringing down big distributors.

Haha but you're right. I still have my C64 manual and it shows how to load drives like floppy and tape with BASIC clearly. Also chapter 8 is about making music on the c64, what an amazing time it was when computer manuals showed how to program.

What are some flaws in FileVault that might make me prefer EncFS? I've only been thinking of activating FileVault lately and my only other experience has been with ELI in FBSD.

I practice in my passwords when i change them.

First of all i use random numbers and letters usually mixing in an exclamation mark or a capital letter in there.

Second of all i practice my passwords until they stick in finger memory. This method is not flawless as for example i must have a keyboard in front of me to remember them.

But i rather like it and i've been using it for many years. So every time i change a password i am at my most vulnerable because i have it written down for about a week until i remember it.

Even under torture i wouldn't be able to say the password because i can't remember it well enough to read it aloud. I must have a keyboard in front of me. ;)

And sometimes when i come out to customers and they have different types of keyboards, or laptops, i get confused and it takes some practice before i am fluent again.

then i noticed that instead of having two gigabit ethernet ports on a box that could act as an excellent router they chose to put in TWO ports for display options and FIVE usb ports.

Seems to me like they only took the Mac Mini chassis, put in new disk options and slapped on Mac OS X Server.

Also how will Xsan work with Xgrid when there's no fibre option?

Seems like clustering these would be awesome but i would also like a distributed filesystem to go with that, please.

Very cool idea and i would get one without hesitation if it had two gigabit ethernet ports. For clustering though i would prefer to have a fibre option too, even if it would jack up the price significantly.

Mars B**hes! A-Yay Yay!

I've worked at Dell support, both client and enterprise, and they're not so bad. Yes, it is usually a bunch of 18 year olds straight out of high school but usually about 50-60% of the team are more than experienced enough to handle the job.

They make mistakes and stuff but they do their best.

The problem is usually Indian support, some of Dell, like the XPS in the past, was out sourced to India and this made Swedes so mad that Dell even allowed Sweden to have XPS support eventually.

I don't know if they'll have Alienware in Sweden, i don't even know if they'll be sold so much here.

First contact with Linux was Mandrake in a PC magazine i bought. Installed, clicked around, saw nothing special but was still very interested so i tried RedHat 7 when it came out in another issue of the same magazine.

Clicked around a bit, played konquest and then finally figured out how to change my window manager, i was now hooked. Then i hacked my ISP and got an angry letter home to my mom about 'netiquette'.

is to swap the memory modules to find out which is causing the problem, if not motherboard. Also i don't see how memory tests running inside an OS can be effective, i'd much rather boot off of a smaller system on a DVD, USB-stick or floppy to run a memory test. Dell servers have those Dell Diagnostics CDs that are very small in memory footprint just in order to run diagnostics on memory. But even they're not perfect so you often have to take memory out and see if you can reproduce errors.

...that this article should come up the day after they implemented a policy of turning all desktop equipment off at my workplace, a global, american owned callcentre business.

I've been turning my computer off for years when i end for the day, i don't find it a strain. Though so far they've been starting the computers at night somehow, WOL or something, so it hasn't had much effect and i never have to sit through POST and the OS boot.