Perhaps balloons and streamers will come in the first Party Service Pack.

I'm pretty sure your resume will match for "C" somewhere...

what have you read about MDCC? Did you know people are running away from MDCC by the tens? When I got to MDCC, therer were 900 people here. When I left, they were probably on the 600. Now, over a year after I left, it has around 300. They lost 600 people in a year and an half. Many of other interns didn't want to stay. And why would the interns that didn't like the spot say something to the mailing list? That most probably would make them fear getting into some sort of black list.

My team there was great. My manager was an asshole probably with a grudge for my nationality. He treated me and all the other guys from my country the same.

But the perks were the same for all interns: less than for the full time guys.

Oh, dear. Ever had a sledge handle break? Or had the head starting to come off? I'm remembering a memorable weekend years ago, on a Habitat for Humanity project, where the volunteers brought _good_ tools and some contractors involved had brought absolute bottom-of-the-barrel, nasty, dangerous tools. We had a little trouble recovering some of our tools from some of the contractor's lowest ranked employees, who really, really wanted our tools, including a very sweet sledge hammer that I also really wanted.

Well, this idea is already around. A Nigerian security firm offered to protect my identity and all my money if I sent them the originals of every form of identification I have, and transferred all my bank accounts to them. Since then, nobody's been able to steal anything from me!

Maybe for "slashmongs" like yourself who apparently don't get the (not-so-subtle) difference between causation and correlation?

Insurance companies certainly care about causation, not simply correlation, e.g. if they instituted a "what did you have for breakfast monitor" and found that 20% of their driving population sample ate Brand X cereals before having an accident (aha! correlation!), I doubt they'd offer discounts for households that swore off Brand X cereal.

Until IE can use sftp we are stuck with ftp. There are numerous clunky workarounds but they tend to confuse casual computer users, such as the 18 or 60 year old ditzy temp secretary that has to upload a file for their boss NOW and ftp is scary enough. If there is no icon for it they cannot find it on their computer and you can forget about installing things at another company. Downloading is easily managed, but for uploads there is still a way to go.
If there is a sftp equivalent of "fireftp" for firefox we'll be halfway there.

Yes, by BPM I was referring to the DDR setting used to control the speed at which the notes flow past the screen. The reason that it must be turned up for higher difficulty songs has less to do with the number of notes on the screen at once, and more to do with the amount of separation between them. At low speeds, there are not enough vertical pixels separating the notes to distinguish the order that they are actually coming in, and whether they are simultaneous (jumps) or not. When played at "normal" speeds, the notes will even overlap each other making a solid "wall" that is nearly impossible to work out, even if you were to pause the game and dissect the screen at your leisure.

Assuming the PS/2 interface still works, you can still log in locally and work blind. It's a little slower, because you have to stop and think more about what you're doing (e.g., tab completion is a good deal less useful), but if you know what you're doing you CAN make it work. Back in the days *before* convenient networking, I used to occasionally have to work blind when a monitor was out for some reason, most commonly to copy files to a floppy disk so I could take them to another computer. Like I said, you have to stop and think, but if you know the system you *can* do it. You don't need to see the output. You can mostly predict what the output is going to be, and if you *do* need to verify some command's output for some reason you can pipe it into a very short Perl script and make it beep once for yes or twice for no, or if worst comes to worst cat the output onto a floppy disk and take it to another computer to analyze.

HTH.HAND.

The Intel DP965LT has a serial port header right on the motherboard, check the manual, page 11 labeled P described on page 12.
pdf of the manual at
http://www.intel.com/support/motherboards/desktop/dp965lt/sb/CS-022910.htm

The Asus M4A78 Plus ALSO has a com1 port on the motherboard, you can look at the pretty pictures on newegg, it's in the lower right corner labeled com1, it's a light blue header.

So we still don't have any motherboards without serial ports...

I will concede however that they seem to have done away with them on many laptops (although I can't buy one that dosen't have one, configuring real routers & etc requires serial)

Oh, and I just want to say that the EEE is more a netbook type device than a laptop type device.

Question, are the USB serial adapters properly supported in linux (and windows) yet? The last time I tried one the drivers were crap and it wouldn't work above 1200 baud.

Just FYI, NT-based OSes (like Windows 2000, XP, Vista, 2003, 2008, etc) allow you to switch their scheduler from "server" mode to "desktop" mode.

Look in Control Panel -> System -> Advanced -> Performance Options -> Advanced (again). The two options are called "Programs" and "Background services."

You have no idea how 'Linux drivers' even slightly work, do you?

No piece of hardware ever comes with Linux drivers. Maybe a few barely-supported things a decade ago, but not any recent stuff.

This is because, unlike Windows, Linux doesn't expect hardware manufacturers to make their own shitty drivers that crash all the time because they're a hardware company and don't know how to write software.

Something like 90% of Windows blue screens post-Windows 98 are because of third-party hardware drivers. XP onwards stopped applications from being able to crash Windows, but there's not a damn thing it can do about shitty drivers. Now they have this 'certification' thing that works somewhat, but hardware companies are not software companies, and still cannot write good software.

This is why Linux drivers come with the kernel, and why kernel developers write them. Of course, the company is free to write their own and submit it to the kernel devs, but that's the distribution point, not some driver CD.

There is nothing stopping hardware manufacturers from saying, in the requirements, 'Linux kernel 2.6.4 or greater', and many, of course, actually do.

In fact, Linux is basically the only OS that you can be sure hardware devices that worked on a version of it in 2000 still work on modern version, which makes your entire premise absurdly idiotic. Linux may sometimes suffer by not having the absolutely newest hardware support, but it has about 10x the backwards compatibility that Windows has. The devices that used to be supported under Linux but are not anymore are probably countable on two hands, whereas there's plenty of XP stuff out there that will never get signed Vista drivers, just like there was plenty of stuff under 98 that never got XP drivers.

This is because the company is in charge of updating them, and they don't give a flying fuck about supporting hardware they don't sell anymore. In fact, they'd rather that old hardware didn't work, because they've got some new stuff to sell you. Whereas with Linux, the kernel people are in charge of keeping the driver updated, and hardware will only stop working if some kernel APIs change enough to break it and no one bothers fix it so it gets removed. (Recently, Linux lost the ability, as it redid its entire IDE/PATA/SATA/SCSI support to be in one unified driver, to read MFM hard drives. Aka, pre-IDE. No one seemed to mind.)

It's somewhat hilarious to hear anyone talk about a 'kernel ABI' on Linux. Man, the Windows kernel ABI and API changes every release, making all hardware manufacturers update, or not, their drivers. Whereas 99% of Linux drivers are already in the kernel, and just change along with it and keep working. It's only the companies that insist on releasing their own drivers that have problems.

Now, WRT to software ABI, there's a valid concern. Or, at least, it was. A long time ago. Nowadays it's trivially easy to release commercial software for Linux that works fine. You put an install script on a CD, you have that either use the package manager (either dpkg or rpm, you can include both on the CD and use whichever one the OS is) or you don't bother with that and just put it in it's own /opt/ directory. Then you stick icons in the right place for Gnome and KDE to pick them up.

If the libaries it needs aren't found, you can install your own, either compat libs for the entire OS, or just in your own directory.

Anyone who can't package software for Linux and have it work on any full-fledged Linux distro made in the last five years shouldn't be writing software.

I challenged him to show me something it could do that UltraEdit couldn't.

How about use it to edit a remote file over ssh, from an Android phone? Or do complex things without using the damn mouse? Or write macros in a usable macro language?

More generally, with commonly used software, some of us just don't care about the learning curve. With the tools I use daily, I don't even remember what the first hour of using them was like, because it was so many thousands of hours ago. I even find it interesting to learn about new ways of doing things, so I don't resent an hour or two of getting up to speed, even if I don't end up using the tool. I could see if I had to learn a new tool an hour before a deadline I'd be annoyed, but the simple solution to that is not to schedule your new-tool experimentation an hour before a deadline. =]

Word/Excel files are still a must for many people.

Still, OS X isn't a competitor to Windows, because it doesn't run on commodity hardware. Lots of people would be willing to license OS X, but few are willing to consider the anaemic Mac hardware line.

It's fine to say, "This is a web browser and that's all it should do," but even the first browser written by CERN did more than that. It had back and forwards buttons. It had a dropdown menu. A place to type your next destination.

These Uzbi people are just being anal, and the result is inconvenience and mucking-up the works. Like making a car that you steer with horse commands ("Giddyup!" "Trot!" "Gallop!" "Woah Nelly!" and so on).