You are assuming that the government had nothing to do with this failure. Software development by committee never ends well.

It's not too uncommon for government projects to have every bureaucrat in the mix trying to get their grubby little paws on it and make it how "they want". I can't even imagine trying to write software and having, literally, thousands of "bosses" giving you contradictory or impossible requirements. Add in lowest-bidder and you start to understand why every government software service you've ever used sucks at least a little bit.

I put Puppy Linux on such machines and it works well. Similar in speed to XP (and doesn't get slower over time). Lubuntu is a bit slow for such work but it does run.

My friends who just want webmail/Facebook/etc use it to browse with no problem. For the really challenged you can delete most of the desktop shortcuts and rename what you keep to what they do.
I tuck a copy of the live CD inside the case of their desktops just in case.

"why do people even try to submit shit articles with bad questions? "

Because the old Slashdot is deader than a pickled herring.

It's acceptable to make first seek time a little slower if you can make many seeks faster in the future by reorganizing some blocks. And if the io scheduler were sufficiently good, then it would be able to prioritize the defrag task somewhere down in the basement, where it would only get blocks when the system looks quiet.

I imagine that this is actually really hard, since otherwise someone would have done it by now. But it still boggles my mind.

It is shocking that in this day and age we still cannot simply launch a defragment task on an arbitrary schedule and have the io scheduler handle keeping it from affecting the other activity on the machine. What fucking year is it?

OK stop already, you guys are driving this joke into the woods.

I started off having problems with ATI drivers twenty years ago with Windows 3.1 and the Mach32. Even Radius could make more stable accelerated video drivers. Hell, so could S3.

Today, people are still having serious problems with their ATI video drivers, now they're just called AMD.

ATI can't code their way out of a nutsack.

Flies also tend to take off backwards, so you can estimate which way they're going to go when they take off and plot accordingly.

Oh, but it did. Now we use both SAE and metric measurements all over the nation.

It isn't whether the ocean is alkaline, but whether it's alkaline enough. Do you really want to see sea life reduced to algae, brittle stars, and squid?

Tee hee. My first Linux box was a 386DX25 with 8MB of DIP DRAM and a 1MB Trident ISA VGA card. I did have a whoppin' 120MB of HDD, though. I have run GPE on iPaq (Familiar) but I've got a 128MB+WiFi CF plus the SD slot.

Their premise is that you'll write your app as a series of separate servers. Then you'll deal with inter-server security instead of inter-process security. If two processes are basically parts of the same program anyway, you can run them on the same server so they can share memory.

I think it's a silly idea, but it's not an inherently bad one. It might well make sense for some kinds of workloads. Until we get back single system image clustering on Linux (there was OpenMOSIX) this might help some people.

Yep. That "someone" is also a paying customer.