Only in monotheistic religions that believe their god suffers from multiple personality disorder.

I see it as even worse than that. If this judeo-christian god created us, then he also made us smart enough to reason about the world around us. Why then, would he scatter all this circumstantial evidence around for an ancient universe, an old earth, evolution and so on? If he created us, then he would also expect us to use our brains. Then why does the old testament contradict what we learn about the world?

I'd rather believe that there is no god than believing in a deceitful trickster god.

Do you really not see the logic disconnect here? Just above you used popularity and volume of texts as the reason for choosing to believe that the Christian god is the true creator.

That is also truth by popularity. I would consider it abundantly clear that we humans seem hardwired to need to be a part of and believe in something than is bigger than the individual. You see that in everything from religion to political groups to even the supporters of a football club.

The correct question would be why we have this need. You seem to be of the opinion that the reason is that there really is a god and that we humans need to connect with him. An other explanation might simply be that humans evolved as group/pack animals, and that this pack instinct is what makes us look for something larger.

At the danger of being downmodded, I'll just add that Linux fanbois are probably doing more damage than good when it comes to bringing new users to the platform.

Linux is great if it works, and if one has the interest/need/time to customize a system there is practically no limit to what one can do. However, the out-of-box experience tends to be worse and one will need to enter the command line a lot faster than on a Windows system due to GUI configuration tools not covering enough aspects of the system yet.

Then there is hardware support. Some hardware is unfortunately not supported, or Linux drivers are only able to use a limited subset of the functionality of some hardware. Most linux users will be quick to tell you that this is due to hardware makers not providing drivers (or the information required to write drivers), and that is for the most part true. Still, the reason why a piece of hardware doesn't work doesn't really matter to the average end user. Complaining about Vista because of driver problems tends to get +1 Insightful around these parts, but doing the same for Linux tends to get a -1 Troll and replies telling you that it is really ATI/nVidia/Creative/etc's fault.

That situation has been getting progressively worse over the years. It used to be that you could give google a sensible set of search terms and you would get back good and updated documentation, these days one often ends up finding half-baked howtos and forum postings that were valid a couple years ago but no longer today. Many of them also just list the steps needed to get a particular thing working with a particular version of some software on a particular distribution, they seldom explain why (i.e., the Linux equivalent of listing the steps of how to fish with a particular fishing rod using a particular line and lure in a particular river, while neglecting to also include some of the generics of fishing so that a user has a hope to use the instructions if he happens to use a slightly different lure).

Also, a Linux distribution is really a collection of a lot of software from a lot of different sources; which also means that documentation for the different pieces are spread all over the place instead of one or a few places. There are a few places that are decent (like tldp.org and some distribution documentation/wiki sites), but it is getting increasingly harder to find good up-to-date instructions by googling.

That said, I for the most part love Linux. But that should not make us blind to the fact that Linux is not perfect, and that for some uses and some users going with Windows or Mac is the better option.

You are still a horrible person for believing that a lack of faith in god automatically means narcissism. You speak much of faith and hope, but you certainly show a horrible lack of faith in humans if you believe that we need some imagined judge in the sky in order to have compassion and love.

Who is a better person? Someone that finds in himself the reasons for love, compassion and regard for others, or someone who needs the threat of judgement day hanging over him?

I agree that MS is not the only one to blame. However, MS was the one that ran the "Windows Vista Capable" program and MS was the one that had final say on what the minimum hardware requirements were for allowing OEMs to slap "Vista Capable" on their machines.

In the generic case I agree with you, MS does not control the hardware market and the dynamics of the hardware market is such that manufacturers will try to cut corners to eke out a tiny profit margin. So I agree with you that blaming MS for sub-standard hardware is barking up the wrong tree.

However, in this particular case MS had full control of which machines got to carry the "Vista Capable" certification and which didn't. MS fumbled bad here, they should have set the standard higher. Since they didn't, customers were misled and people ended up with "$2100 email machines".

And this entire article is about how MS aided and abetted that. See "Vista Capable"(r)(tm).

Oooh, neat! Could you comment on how well this works in real life? That is, how is performance, how well does it scale and how resilient is it?

I suspect one could end up with devil in details problems if the guest OS suddenly saw different CPUID values. While it might work fine, the expectation has always been that CPUID won't change after boot-up so you could end up with all sorts of snafus.

What you could do is have the hypervisor trap CPUID and report a least common dominator set of capabilities for the CPUs in the cluster. Or have CPUID report more capabilities than the weakest/oldest CPUs but have the hypervisor trap and emulate those instructions when running on those CPUs.

I must admit that I'm not quite up to date on the details, but isn't the VT/AMD-V changes only visible to the hypervisor (ring -1)? It might make moving VM state harder (the hypervisor has to handle migrating AMD-V state to the equivalent VT state), but it should be invisible to the guest OS running inside the VM.

I would suspect that Guest OS visible changes (ring 0-3) would be harder to handle (like migrating from a CPU that has SSE2 to one that doesn't). The hypervisor would either have to trap and emulate the missing instructions, or trap cpuid and tell the guest OS that the CPU only supports a least common denominator set of extensions.

I don't have much experience with BGP, but running ipsec on a Cisco 160x wasn't exactly fast either.

Your Mileage May Vary

That's actually a funny coincidence. Car analogies is a /. meme and that expression originated as a car advertisement disclaimer.

The cable modem has been unstable and the troubleshooting steps taught to the other people in the domicile is "restart all them boxes". So, no impressive uptime to paste.

In my experience, pretty much all home broadband routers are stable when they are using proper firmware like Tomato, dd-wrt or open-wrt. Just make sure you get one (e.g. WRT54GL) that is supported.

Or one could redirect the output of a program to someone else's terminal.

echo "I'm alive! Time to conquer the world!" > /dev/tty1

'apropos' is kinda like google. It is very useful, provided you know what to search for.