Makes me laugh every time someone suggests a tax going away. They'll just figure out how to tax you for "fuelling" your electric car. Taxes don't go away, just added to.

Huh, so the Aggies had it right after all. We refer to them as t.u.

Except that, at least on all the machines (laptop and desktop) that I've run Windows installs on in the last 5+ years, Windows *never* has the ethernet driver needed. Either I luckily squirreled the driver away on a separate partition, or I have to use a different computer to download it via sneakernet. That's only an option because I have multiple computers around.

On the other hand, every linux distro I've tinkered with in the last decade or so has always been able to talk to my ethernet devices (WiFi is a different story -.-)

And install speed is largely just a function of your HDD speed, for both linux and windows.

Bah, no one got around to answering this over the weekend? Relevant to the topic, even :

One of my buddies in college wrote one of the (now) biggest smartphone barcode-based price-comparison apps as his senior project. At the time, he used a dedicated server for the app to dial into, and he entered prices by hand into its database. Being the ubergeek that he is, I'm sure it's well automated by now.

Single best piece of advice I've read here in quite some time. Thanks, I hadn't yet figured out that it was just idle that had the screwed up controls.

Aye - for example, my current job is working on a fairly large ASP.NET/C# codebase. No one remaining in the department was around when they chose this platform, but it's big enough that rewriting it really isn't an option. No one in my shop is a MS fan, but we all enjoy a nice job in a nice company anyway, despite working nearly exclusively on MS platform.!

Maybe once upon a time you could see x island from there, before the smog developed. Now it doesn't matter how good the weather is, you'll never see that island from there again.