Actually, if you pull up the same chart on Yahoo! Finance and switch it to linear scale, it looks much, much worse for Ballmer. With a linear scale, it looks like they were going to hit +INF under Gates, and it immediately plummets under Ballmer.

(And for the AC replying to you, 0.01 displayed to 1 decimal place is 0.0.)

Only problem is, underscore isn't allowed for most DNS records, especially A, AAAA and CNAME. You'll have to get anonymous-coward.xxx. (Hostnames within it are your own business, if you feel you need www.)

Him: "We're just going to start in the Cloud, we won't bother with a virtual server to start off."

*hands over server information*

Me: "Hmmm, that looks exactly like a virtual server with 'virtual server' crossed out and 'Cloud' written in with a crayon. Right down to where it uses Xen."

I've easily got 30-40 windows open at once. Console sessions on a dozen remote machines, several Web browsers with distractions and reference manuals, e-mail window, ticketing system, VMware GUI (only needed for Windows VMs, all the UNIX/Linux/BSD ones can be got to via SSH from a native terminal), a few Emacs "frames" (since they called text regions "windows" before the GUI term was well-known)....

What I don't have, though, is a need to see all of that at once. 2-3 desktops to keep things organized (business meta-management on 1, ticketing/bug fix on 2, build consoles on 3, and VMware on 4.)

I need at most 3-4 windows visible, and rarely all of them: the active command window, for example, I only need to see a few lines around the prompt. The window(s) with a man page open, that I need to see in its entirety. Basically, I need to see all of the windows I'm reading from, but very little of the one I'm writing to. (So focus-auto-raise, a la Mac, is a truly atrocious UI feature for the way I work.)

If all the new stuff is really this restrictive, I still have the source code for Motif and my .mwmrc file from 1993.

That's how we built the railroad in Canada.

Then we felt bad and put up a memorial to all the Chinese workers who died. It's near the Skydome, off the north-west corner. Doesn't really make it right.

Immigrant labour in the New World is, well, basically how the New World got started.

GRUB2 is certainly an upgrade for EFI-based systems. I had to download and build my own copy of GRUB2 to run Fedora from an external USB disk on a Mac. (The Bootcamp BIOS emulation thing only allows use of the first internal disk. And it means you're still dealing with BIOS.)

The GRUB2 BIOS systems I'm running seem to behave themselves, but that's only a couple of test VMs.

It's great for HTPC nodes, too. No disk on any node, all you need is a couple gig of RAM, a LAN port, and something cheap for video like an nVidia 9400M (the ION platform, basically).

Well, you can try and get people like that to make better decisions by explaining why the heavier one in blue is better.

Or you can get a company to make a better lightweight one in pink and get a cut of the action yourself. (Or you can re-skin other vendor's machines; there's a variety of businesses doing that with MacBooks; you can even get pink.)

I can pretty much guarantee the money is found by accepting people as they are and selling them something they think they want. (I don't know how to actually do that, so I remain a cog in the corporate machine.)

That's all right, he also claims serum cholesterol is a predictor of heart disease and doesn't back that one up at all.

Switch off the theme engine in Windows 7; set it to Windows Default. Also, turn off all the little animations; there's a setting somewhere in the System control panel (I have to use the classic view to find it) where you can turn a knob to "Performance" and it kicks out a lot of the effects.

Basic rule to Windows survival: Make it look as close as you can to Windows 2000. The lower-grade your CPU or GPU is, the more important it is to do this. So it can make a huge difference on a VM, especially if you don't have 3D acceleration support.

Hmmm, just about all Linux implementations are ELF-basted, so they use a GOT (global object table), not a TOC (table of contents). AIX is probably the only "current" XCOFF-and-TOC-based OS you can get. Windows uses COFF for object files, but their load format (PE/COFF) doesn't use TOC, it uses an IAT.

So, neither Windows nor Linux have a TOC at all.

Or maybe acronyms can have more than one meaning, I always forget that....

Uh, that's not how it works.

You put the public key on the machine you're going to (in this case, the laptop).

The private key stays on the machine you run the 'ssh' command from.

And keep that private key within a single trust domain (single machine for home/school use; department LAN at the office if you must). So stealing a copy of the PUBLIC key can't compromise any other node--all you can do with it is allow someone to log on to more machines. You can't impersonate them, or log on to the machine with their private key, or any other machine with the same public key.

And, of course, you're using a passphrase on the key--though that doesn't affect the public key, only access to the private key.

I last went in a Sony store (in the Toronto Eaton Centre) about 4 years ago.

The only thing interesting about it was the miniature radio museum, showing various models of Sony radio from the iconic "transistor" set to a AM/FM/MW/LW set from the '80s.

Needless to say, they didn't have any modern equivalent for sale--they suggested the Web site.

And it can fall back to SMS/MMS or e-mail--you can pick which in settings.

...but... I don't know who to trust.... No, that's wrong, I trust no-one.

That's easy to deal with in Postfix. Just do 'permit_sasl_authenticated' before any of the rejection rules, like 'reject_invalid_helo_hostname' or 'reject_unknown_reverse_client_hostname'.

That way, anyone who can do an authenticated SMTP session doesn't need to have rDNS or anything else set right. But MTAs, which don't use authentication, will be held to a higher standard.

I don't even bother requiring authentication on the submission port; if you meet the requirements to send through port 25, you can do it on submission as well. And vice-versa; if you can do an AUTH session on port 25, you can relay and don't have to have rDNS and so on.

(Postfix given as an example 'cause it's what I use; I would expect any decent SMTP server can do the same sort of things. If not, here's $0.00 and you can get your own copy of Postfix.)