Thank you for the responses, I see the light ;-)

To maintain state between remote clients.

Forgive my ignorance, but what do you mean, exactly? How does using VNC help this as opposed to using x-forwarding? I honestly don't understand.

The reason I ask is because I routinely remotely access my desktop machine (ubuntu 11.04 running stock gnome desktop) from my ten year old laptop (bootable kubuntu feisty CD, running KDE) using 'ssh -C -Y' and then calling whatever application I want to use (usually eclipse) and it works just great. If I want to remotely run the desktop itself I just call 'startx' instead of the application. It works fine. I'm just confused as to why VNC could possibly offer any benefit over doing it the way I described.

I mean, yeah, if I want to access my desktop machine from a remote Windows machine, VNC would probably be the path of least resistance, but otherwise I can't see how VNC would be preferable. Can you shed any light on this?

FWIW, I actually bothered to log into ask this so I can look later and see if anyone can help me out here ;-P

Why would I pay the dickhead tax twice? I'd rather buy a well made Win7 machine and throw a decent linux distro on it instead.

^ this.

Meh, well including myself, most ADO.Net programmers use parameterized queries because thats what Visual Studio spoon-feeds you. Nothing wrong with that. In PHP i'll concat to my hearts content in a text editor. Does PHP have an IDE that provides the same functionality (really, I don't know).

In the hands of the capable, either are worthwhile languages. What really gets you is when you don't first sanitize your inputs. You can screw that up in any language :-)

Ahh, and not only exciting, but would only later be known as 'epic'. My first foray into the internet was on our school library's VT100 terminals which were primarily used for queuing up inter-library loan requests. This was in 1995. Getting Mortal Kombat cheat codes and fatalities was never so easy. I also remember printing off the Duke Nukem 3D build editor docs on that same machine, but I think that was a bit later on. Shortly after my church confirmation class took a trip to a ''church'' college which had machines which displayed the WWW in all its graphical glory. They were running Netscape (probably 2.0 or 3.0, I didn't bother to check at the time). I was smitten. Not long after that, our town got local dialup access, and at age 15 I convinced my mom to let me pay for and install a second phone line for it. I soon learned enough HTML and Javascript to 'hack' the Perl/CGI chat room I used to fool around in -- giving myself full administrative ability. W00t! The coolest damned thing I ever did was play my chatroom buddy in Quake II -- ON THE INTERNET!

To this day, there is nothing more exciting than hearing that 14.4 modem chirp off the connection sequence. Sometimes I kinda wish my DSL connection made that same noise. I'll always treasure those halcyon days. Thank you, Mr. modem inventors. Mine served me well far longer than it should have, mostly reliably, and is the singlemost important reason I ever became a computer geek. Thanks a million! Now who is calling me at five in the morn--

-AT++[NO CARRIER]

I am starting to think the airlines want this.

Funny, but I am not so sure you are wrong, but maybe not for the reason you stated. I had a well thought-out reason why, but I am afraid to post it because of the outside chance I could be arrested for painting the government in a less than perfect light. How is that for sad? I think my sig says it all.

Not exactly, it just means that we will treat you nice (for the most part) regardless of whether or not we actually like you. The knife in the back is completely optional.

Contrast with New Yorkers, who are more than happy to hand out unsolicited "fuck you's" for just being in their presence.

Yep, its real achievement.

Make Love, Not Warcraft.

There is an episode of South Park by the same name that mocks WoW. This achievement was Blizzard's tongue-in-cheek response to that.

Some touchpad manufacturers have software to allow this, track down who made your touchpad and see if they have any goodies on the website. I know on my old Presario there was some software that would allow you to do neat things like use it as a tablet... and it was even pressure sensitive. Of course, a touchpad is a pretty damn small writing surface, so I never really used it for anything.