I don't understand the yuck-factor. Go buy a McChicken at the big yellow M. There's nothing recognizably chicken-ish about that product at all. The taste and texture is completely different from the chicken I tasted as a kid, when my grandfather would routinely kill and prepare his own chickens for dinner. I can tell you from personal experience that the yuck-factor in actually killing a chicken with a blade is much higher than that of an electricallly stimulated nuggy grown inside a petri dish.

Well, with the GEM/KMS work on Intel progressing I'd guess FreeBSD support for Nouveau will also come within reach..

The Hobbit, scarcely 300 paper pages of children's story in print, leads to a big data problem. Now there's excessive bloat if I ever saw any.

I used to be 29 when working with a colleague who was 64 at the time. He learned programming in ALGOL on Burroughs mainframes. Very tight, very sparse, very unreadable when he did Perl. Perl in fact lets you do this, as does C, but it's not needed anymore. It was downright impossible to get him to rename functions and variables to something descriptive or to use comments. That stuff used to cost back when the bits of RAM were visible with the naked eye. Today the balance tips another way. Doesn't mean the old dogs see any merit in that though and they will wield their seniority when pushed too hard. Personally I can really enjoy tweaking 6502 or 68K assembly by hand, but that's a hobby. At work I deal with business applications that, when slow, usually are just fed more iron because it's cheaper. The inner geek cringes at the thought, but it's the reality of business.

Investment implies some form of return.. Sinking time into pointless games in't an investment, it's a waste.

--Ebenezer Scrooge

Halon? Are those even legal anymore!?

Back in 1992'ish my 386 PC with its 20MHz. CPU and 4MB RAM ran Ultima VII. It had an utterly believable game world with a huge amount of freedom and interactivity and layer upon layer of depth to the story. Seeing how the laptop I'm typing this from runs at 2.5GHz. and has 4GB's of RAM, I'm deeply disappointed with the state of gaming as it is now. FPS games got better graphics, but their stories are hardly much more than running along waypoints shooting everything that moves. Origin went utterly down the tubes when EA got involved. Sadly there probably won't ever be a game like Ultima VII, but updated in depth and scope for today's hardware.

(Despite Redhat being our organization's standard) The point in time when this was decided was also the point in time your organization stopped thinking about stuff like this, right? Seriously, I'm usually not one for breaking the mold but the threat of tunnel vision is definitely there if you stop looking from side to side.

FreeBSD? Right here on my laptop, my media center, my personal web and mail servers, and a hell of a lot of servers (est. 400 or so) at work. But we probably haven't met. If we have, I generally don't use my preference for FreeBSD as a conversation starter.

Prototypes? There's an automated convenience store right here in my street, it's been there for about 8 years now. I can go there in the dead of night to get a can of pringles or a box of dishwasher-tabs if need be.. but it's ludicrously expensive (I don't understand why), so the only thing I ever bought there was a USB stick years ago.

Eowyn, Arwen, heck, even Rosie Cotton comes across as independent strong female characters to me and I'd say Galadriel is quite capable of pulling her own weight in the story.

Uh.. yeah.. you really need to get out of there. I wish you the best of luck! Oh, and DRM bad indeed.

Fuck FAT! Hmm.. never thought I'd reverse those two words and it would actually mean something not related to lipids. Interesting..

Where did RobbieThe1st say Linux was ready for the masses? You're frothing at the mouth for all the wrong reasons here. My take? I use Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD -heck- even IRIX still. I'm not the slightest bit interested in "the masses" or what they need or want. I value the freedom to build and manage my own computer the way I see fit. This has nothing to do with feeling 'leet' or any other juvenile excuse for misplaced feelings of superiority. Windows has no place on my systems but that's not because I think Microsoft is somehow inherently evil. It's just that on Windows I feel like I'm forced to use my computer with one hand tied behind my back. That's nothing more than simple personal preference built on -most likely- sub-optimal habits learned in a past when GUI's weren't even available, and you're welcome to have a different opinion. Funny that you should mention and disqualify Haiku, though. If there's any OS that would fit your preference for being usable without a CLI it'd be BeOS and its free Haiku sibling. Sure, it still has a CLI if you want it (much like Windows and every other OS under the sun except MacOS Classic), but it's not needed. When it comes to "the masses" I'm always surprised by the ease with which 1% of computer users is dismissed as 'next to nothing'. Have you ever stopped to think about how many individuals you're talking about when you say 1% of all computer users in the world? That'd be enough people to fill a small to mid-sized country with and it's certainly enough -as decades of steady development, growth and improvement have proven- to sustain free software as a viable choice in computing. You should also understand that the ecosystem that forms around free software is not (nor was it ever intended to be) a single entity with a clear direction or even any kind of unifying goal. Sure, some commercial entities have emerged and made money using free software. They are welcome to do so and their contributions are very much welcomed, but making money or conquering percentages of market share is not the purpose. The only unifying aspect to the free software community is the combination of freedom and software, nothing else. Anyone who attempts to use free software as a stick to beat some other interest, is pushing an agenda of their own and is not representative of the loosely-knit group of people who love their freedom in computing. You're just as welcome as any other to simply take it or leave it, no questions asked. The rest is up to you.

As long as you have a true SPP parallel port on your system you should be good to go. Admittedly, these are becoming quite rare and it'd probably be cheaper to scavenge an old 486 from a dumpster somewhere than to try and find an actual PCI board that has such a port. Most on-board parallel ports theses days tend to do ECP and aren't 100% SPP compatible anymore. The good part is that moving your precious old files off those flimsy disks will be a one-off operation and you can put the sticky 486 back into the dumpster you found it in as soon as it's done.