I wouldn't be surprised if (at least in significant part) this is to push early sales of Windows 7 licenses. Kind of funny - leverage the reluctance to leave the old(est) OS for fear of ending up with the old(er) OS to make sales of your new OS go up.

I can see why an XP shop would go ahead and get Windows 7 licenses for new machines ASAP so they could downgrade them to XP rather than being stuck with a heterogeneous (XP and Vista) configuration and having to support two OSes.

Amen, brother! Over here in Idaho I get *so* sick of all the corvettes I see. They're EVERYWHERE!

2 years ago I got an Athlon FX-2 6000+, a motherboard that supports 16 gigs of ram, a GeForce 8600 GTS (512MB), 4 gigs of ram, and a 256 GB SATAII hard drive for about $5-600 total and just threw it in an existing case with other peripherals. At today's prices I can upgrade the ram to 16 gigs and the vid card to something more recent pretty dang cheap.

The CPU is a bit dated but not much of what I do is CPU bound anyway. I run a lot of concurrent VMs that mostly just sit around and play a game here or there.

Just gotta shop around a bit when you buy. When I bought that stuff it was hardly high end - it all cost less than $600.

Fixed it for ya. Problem here is that the voters don't care enough to make sure the elections are working the way they should. They want to care about it once every 4 years, 2 years at best, and then go back to caring about their MySpace page. If people cared more about the politics running their nation in general they'd raise more of a fuss about things like voting machines' discrepancies.

Right here.

Most likely this was a microsite that a small marketing company pitched to either ASUS or Microsoft. Marketing companies frequently get little ideas like this and approach someone that isn't currently their client with them. Because of their low cost they get approved pretty often and you end up with a bunch of little non-uniform sites representing the end-client all around the interspace.

If you know ahead of time that you'll be re-installing you can save/restore your package selections and save a bunch of time: http://jwoffenden.blogspot.com/2009/03/yet-another-great-trick-with-apt-get.html

Essentially you just dump a list of installed packages to a file then when you re-install you tell apt to install them. Tricks like that and having a separate /home partition brought my time from re-install to up and running like normal to practically nothing.

I can see why you'd think that if you hadn't been using PHP. For a long time PHP has supported this:
$myArray['arbitraryString'] = $value;
Or:
$myArray[$arbitraryNumber] = $value;
It would create that member of that array and assign the value. So since I'm allowed to put anything I want between the [] and it'd work, it makes sense that if I didn't care what the index value was I could leave it blank and one would be automatically assigned.

Holy shit, there are other /.ers in Idaho?

I'm thrilled there isn't a law against me being alcohol in gas stations in Utah. The Draconian laws of physics and chemistry prevent me from being alcohol everywhere in other states. How lame.

Not entirely true. Qt Assistant puts MSDN to shame, and the documentation on php.net isn't so bad either. Sure there isn't good documentation in every arena that open source touches, but it touches many many arenas. In some ( like the above mentioned Qt Assistant) open source stuff trumps MSDN.

I feel the same way. I asked the same question in a DMCA seminar at my college

The response was that the DMCA states that benefiting directly or indirectly from a copy is violation of copyright law. In this case you have the indirect benefit of escaping the normal wear and tear of the method of purchase you chose (CD), and are in violation.

That, to me, destroys the credibility of the DMCA.

I checked and it's not registered yet. Am I the only one that's disappointed in /.?

This is another reason it'd be smart for Microsoft to say that Linux is a bigger competitor than Apple if they fear Apple. It would be smart for them to downplay Apple as a competitor as much as they can so people will think that Apple isn't about to change the nature of the market (and thus they should not bother to consider switching to Apple or adopting a cross-platform strategy).

Linux is held at large as being a minor player and a hacker's OS. So if they can say "Even Linux is a bigger player than Apple" then they are effectively saying "Apple is irrelevant, you may safely ignore them."

Ok - bad example on my part. A better one would be hiking prices for their competitors and only their competitors (or finding a more shifty way to do that in a slightly less blatant but effectively similar fashion).