I've never heard of AmiPro, but I'd be surprised if any Windows 3.1 program (that wasn't driver-dependent) didn't run perfectly under Wine. Definitely worth a shot I'd say.

As for hardware and software support... when was the last time you called up Microsoft and they actually were able to help you solve your problem? I'm sure it happens on occasion, but every time I've reported a problem in their software (such as a ViewMaster monitor which was always detected incorrectly by Windows XP as a TV upon boot and made the screen low-res and all green), Microsoft's never done squat to fix it.

Contrast that to GNU/Linux. I ordered a Bryton GPS cycling computer, and assumed it would support GNU/Linux. It didn't, my bad. Fortunately, I found somebody who wrote a driver for a similar model. I gave them the specs of what I had, and they whipped up some driver modifications to get my device working perfectly - just to help a brother out.

Somebody got LightRoom working under a patched version of Wine and shared the details. If you upgrade to a new version of Windows 3 years down the road and LightRoom stops working, do you really expect Microsoft or Adobe to support you? I be the Wine community would. There is support, and then there is support.

You get my point.

I'm using Exetel which is a small ISP that relies on some of the much larger ISPs for infrastructure. My particular plan routes data via Optus, whereas the Exetel example given by the EEF blog post is by someone using a plan routed via AAPT. I can access the website without issue. iiNet at work is also fine.

I suspect this is not a request by the government to ISPs to block a particular site, mainly because I've read that Optus was happy to voluntarily block content - and they're not doing it. Not yet, at least.

I agree with you on the importance of backwards compatibility, but MS hasn't particularly cared about it in a long time.

For example, want to play old Windows games like C&C RA or Dark Reign over LAN? IPX hasn't been supported in Windows since Vista - but GNU/Linux still has it, so these games can only run perfectly over LAN (without unofficial game hacks) on a modern OS under Wine.

Seems like the whole ordeal was about the right length for a movie.

...and that's when you use something like BetterPrivacy (in Firefox at least). http://fixtracking.com/

TFA says Copyright. The issue is with the Slashdot heading.

Specifically here:

http://features.slashdot.org/story/13/01/06/163248/richard-stallman-answers-your-questions

It sounds like the article is just about copyright - not trademarks or patents or whatever else "Intellectual Property" is supposed to mean.

Didn't RMS just tell everyone off the other day for using that term? :)

I actually agree with your concerns, but quit with the swearing, fix the 'S' key on your keyboard, and stop bashing people who don't agree with you. That's why you're marked as a troll.

At my school, our TI-38 calculators had to be handed in prior to the examination for a factory reset.

Okay... Funny reading this after just playing some Crysis 2 under WINE on Debian GNU/Linux...

$ for i in `1 2 3 4 5 6 7`
> do
> echo ${1}
> done
1: command not found
$

Instead, try a Bash loop like this (which is also less typing):

for i in {1..7}
do
        dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda bs=2M
done

I believe something like bs=2M (writing two mebibytes at a time) will significantly speed the process up in most cases.

"Used to"? I'm still rocking the N900, with Maemo and Debian GNU/Linux wheezy dual-boot.

There's also Arch, Ubuntu, etc. Many also run one of these distributions in a Maemo chroot. I bet it would have WebOS ported to it if only it had more power. Android is also ported via Nitdroid (although I hear newer versions such as ICS run too slowly).

HP laptops have the same problem, as I have discovered first-hand. Consequently, I will never buy a HP or ThinkPad (unless I'm certain the BIOS/UEFI is replaceable with coreboot or some such). My Sony Vaio (AMD E-350) runs Debian wheezy just fine and I even upgraded the old Atheros miniPCIe card to a newer Atheros AR9002WB-2NG that I found on eBay without issue.

Interestingly, the lspci -v output of the device actually says "Subsystem: Lenovo Device 31a4". I wonder if this was actually pulled from a recent Levono, or they just added that to try to trick Levono machines into working with it...

I have been pleasantly surprised how open the Sony laptop hardware has been actually, given the stupid stunts Sony has pulled in the past with their other devices and software.