Unfortunately, this move has ended the matchmaking capability of Microsoft Flight Simulator X, the last title of the series before Microsoft fired ACES Studio, this seems a great shame, as the game still had well over 100 people using the service at any given moment, and Microsoft is unlikely to foot the bill for a premium service considering their abandoned support of the title. Thankfully there is also a direct connect system whereby a user enters an IP address, but this just isn't as effective for the community at large. I'll be the first to admit that from the get-go there were many bugs with the system, with GameSpy and ACES passing the blame between each other, and eventually getting nowhere, but it allowed thousands of like-minded enthusiasts to meet and form lasting relationships, and feel it will be sorely missed.

This looks like a seriously interesting release. My only gripe with PC-BSD before now was the PBI system whereby you would end up with a large number of redundant packages and libraries as everything was duplicated. Now it's probably got to the point where I can start recommending this over Linux Mint (although I do still need to test it for hardware support).

The MSFS series has unfortunately never been procedure approved. However, I'm pretty sure that X-plane has a special version which is procedure approved (I don't know what the difference between this and the standard version is though). I don't think flightgear is, but i've not followed them in a while.

what about Debian and Arch? http://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/ http://www.archhurd.org/

Hah, nice reference. I wonder how much of the modern Slashdot community will get it though

I live in England in a town that was designed and developed in the 1960s. The ENTIRE TOWN relies on roundabouts. It houses around 100,000 people and there's literally only 1 set of traffic lights in town and they're temporary and on a roundabout anyway. The traffic flow is fine and i've never seen a single accident on them. The nearest i've seen is someone break down on one, and due to the size of the area they broke down in they didn't hinder traffic anyway. It sounds strange to think of people struggling with the concept of roundabouts but I suppose it's tricky to imagine being new to the concept.

Luckily IE8 does actually run on XP. I don't think google are trying to stop supporting up-to-date XP users just yet.

I for one have never really seen the point behind spending thousands of (pounds/dollars) on a gaming pc capable of playing the latest games, only to be surpassed within a few months. As things currently stand, it's actually opening PC gaming to a far wider audience as the price of an adequate gaming rig is quite reasonable. Also, i'd rather have longer and better games than I would slightly better looking ones. And even still, games with modding support can often receive graphical boosts down the line anyway.

Or, there is the rumoured black art of holding the alt key before clicking on the menu. It is said a shutdown option magically appears.

I have found the IMSLP to be a very useful source of scores whilst studying music, and all of the scores are in the open domain. I just don't understand what there can be to argue about?

That's rather a good point. Personally i've always just used spotify free to stream my music but this has the fairly major disadvantage of only being 160kbps vorbis. I only own one album in FLAC form and have to admit you can hear the difference between it and some of my higher quality mp3 albums. The fact that it's an open format will help it be future proof as well. Win Win situation.

I think if my computer had face recognition it would grow scared of me over time! (either that or just start arguing back at me, that would be almost as bad as using vista :o).

I'm personally full supporting a move away from proprietary software in government, it can only be a move for the good.

Unfortunately I've already fallen in to that trap. A few times now i've gone and accidentally permanently deleted data. Luckily I do backup, once a decade >.>.