He coined a word for it, "Eucatastrophe".

Debugging installation failures on hosts in a dev environment, probably 20 times a day. I just need to see what the installer reported and to interact with it. These fancy interfaces give you all the bells and whistles but seem to end up making the basics unreliable. 19200 works fine for me.

How long have you got? ILO often hangs (as in the ILO *server*) when extremely long lines are sent to it. Some features as licensed on per-host basis. Unless you only have one supplier you end up with having to use a mixture of tools to do the same operations. I haven't used one of these proprietary tools that doesn't suck big-time. The worst offender is Dell's Java KVM. I have to fire up a Windows VM whenever I have to use it. Once configured serial just works.

They meant to say "Nearly sold ONE".

Yes, how long have you been asleep for?

because Terry Pratchett said so.

Beyond 'hello world' that's always the case. Let alone in real-world projects the dates change, the team members change etc.

we don't get summers here.

for visiting the mother-in-law.

or should I patent that before Ballmer does?

Recently I found myself struggling with a question I should easily have been able to answer: Why would anyone want to use Windows as their everyday desktop (or laptop) operating system?

They can rip each other to shreds if the mood takes them.

You're new here aren't you? Software always has to fix up the screwups the hardware engineers made.

8GB on a PAE kernel. I wanted to keep the same distro on all systems, my server is an elderly Athlon (i.e. 32 bit)