On financial Microsoft problems:
"We want to make it absolutely clear that this is not a crisis of mismanagement,"

- Steve Ballmer
(aka the guy who manages Microsoft)

I dunno, I think there are enough script kiddie contests. I want to see more real hacker contests - like where the winner actually finds a new exploit, or even one where the winner fixes an exploit and provides a patch.

Even though you're whining, you know that 95% of the time, it is the system drive on a windows machine. If you're working tech support, and someone comes up and tells you their c: just exploded, then you're going to know what they mean. And don't even try to argue that you think it's a floppy drive, that's just plain silly. Who even uses those anymore?

Whether or not C: is always the system partition or not is irrelevant to my point. I was just pointing out the benefits of the "UNIX way" of naming and using block devices. Like I said, /dev/hda3 tells me it's the 3rd partition on the first (drive 0) drive in the system, and that it's most likely IDE. C: tells me nothing of the sort, just like D: or E: or Z: or AAAA:. The "Windows way" also lacks quick and easy ways to directly access the block device, just as it lacks quick and easy ways to mount any device at any point in the directory hierarchy.

What's wrong with good ole c:? Whenever you read it, you know exactly what the person is talking about. If you go with hda3 or somesuch, you're not going to know if you're talking about a swap file or what have you. Linux is unnecessarily complicated on this point. I've gone through hell trying to get my flash drive working on different linux machines at work because they aren't set up to mount sda volumes or somesuch. Then I couldn't fix the problem because the only guy who knew the su password was out of town. Went home early that day -- so I guess it wasn't all bad. /dev/hda3? Why that's the 3rd partition on the first hard drive in the system, of course.

What's wrong with C:? What is C:? What is E:? Is it a mapped drive? Is it a floppy? CD-ROM? Is it my USB keyring? C: isn't always the system drive on your Windows machine - I've had systems that for whatever reason had the G: or D: drive as the system drive. What do you mean C: isn't actually the drive itself? What do I do if I need to access the block device directly? What do you mean...

If I were a carpenter I'd
Hammer on my piglet, I'd
Collect the seven dollars and I'd
Buy a big prosthetic forehead
And wear it on my real head

Everybody wants prosthetic
Foreheads on their real heads
Everybody wants prosthetic
Foreheads on their real heads

No, but after my wife read that comment I might as well be. :wq!

I guess it's all a matter of preference. Right now my glibc is washing the dishes, which is great since my wife won't. However, in some other house they might want glibc to stay the hell out of the kitchen.

None of the sissy GUI installs.

You mean you had to learn how your computer worked to make it work?

Come on - you gotta admit it's so much easier to pop a shiny disc thing into the box, hit the button, and have it do its thing so that you can get right to posting on the Ubuntu forums to complain about having to type "sudo" before you want to do something in that annoying little "terminal" window that they should work on getting rid of asap.

...or even when the kernel wouldn't even self host and you still needed a running minix system...Kids these days don't know how good they have it.

Whippersnappers sans bootstrappers. Shameful.

Why... in my day my old man would smack me with an oak limb if I forgot to sync the filesystem three times before shutting down.

We rarely run at full CPU Heat kicking.

That's the 2nd time I've heard that this month.

"Many Ubuntu users, including me, have noticed that the latency of desktop operations got significantly larger around the time Gutsy was released, which coincides with the Completely Fair Scheduler and kernel upgrade from 2.6.18."

Uhh.. I didn't see anything in there about the Complete Fair Queuing - you just mentioned Completely Fair Scheduler, then kernel 2.6.18.

"Feisty had the 2.6.18 kernel and was quite responsive, so CFQ is in the clear. Gutsy featured 2.6.23 with CFS and was much slower which means it is a possible suspect."

This performance bug has been reported since 2.6.18.

CFS was introduced in 2.6.23, not 2.6.18. CFQ was introduced in 2.6.18.

This I/O scheduler was introduced as the default in 2.6.18 and available since 2.6.13. I wonder if that has something to do with it. I'm going to test it out on my home machines later today and have a look-see.

Supposedly it can be disabled and the AS scheduler can be used if you change it at runtime in /sys/block/hda/queue/scheduler, or use the "elevator=as" boot option.