Anybody remember "boot" magazine? They were kind of a computer power user magazine in the late 90's. One month they ran a feature on alternative operating systems, and included Debian 2.0 on their demo disc.

I managed to get it installed and dual-booting with Win 95, although I never got X working. Played a little Nethack and some light programming but didn't really touch Linux for a couple more years. Later I dual booted Red Hat 7.0 and SuSE 8.0, finally went Windows-free with Mandrake 9.1.

After that it was Fedora, then Gentoo, then Ubuntu - which I'm currently running on my desktop and netbook.

My heartfelt thanks to Linus, Stallman, and all the people who make open source possible and successful.

The C128 and Amiga actually had quite nice keyboards. They had a good feel, although quiet. My current keyboard (Kensington from the early 2000's) is pretty close with regards to that feel.

I did own a Model M keyboard at one point and thought it had a good feel also, but the clicking was a bit annoying. To each their own, eh? In some ways I wish my PC keyboard had the layout of the C128, with " being on Shift-2 instead of next to the Enter key.

Maybe fanatical Mac users are just really annoying, for example this Falcon guy has replied to just about every thread in this story. Give it a rest fella, we all know how you feel!

As another data point, I have also had trouble with Apple hardware. I purchased a new and slightly overpriced 12" G4 Powerbook in 2005, but soon after the warranty expired the trackpad stopped working.

After taking the machine into the "genius" bar, I was informed that the trackpad would need replacement to the tune of $200. Being an economical sort, I ordered the part through a vendor and replaced it myself. Surprise, it didn't fix the issue. Apparently the trackpad issue was really a problem with the motherboard, and I wasn't about to replace that. In the end, I sold it because a subcompact without a working trackpad was useless to me.

Long story short, I'll stick with cheap, reliable hardware and run Linux on it.

The Great Flood is one of the stupider parts of the bible, the volume of water required to cover the entire surface of the earth up to the highest mountains would be beyond enormous. It would be on the order of a planetary body the size our moon, made of water.

If such a huge volume of water existed on the earth fairly recently, where did it go? Did it drain into the earth? Do you also believe the earth is hollow?

sudo apt-get install srware-iron
[sudo] password for user:
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
E: Couldn't find package srware-iron

Bummer :(

You're not a web developer, obviously. Supporting multiple browsers is nothing like having several makefile targets. To make a bad analogy, it's more like trying to compile a C program so a single binary works in Win16, Win32, MacOS, *nix, and BeOS.

IE8 will have full CSS 2.1 compliance? I'll believe it when I see it.

Instead of simply making assertions it's much more informative to compare CSS support by function, as in the following chart:

CSS contents and browser compatibility

From this it appears that IE8 DOES have improved CSS 2.1 support from previous versions, although it's still lacking in certain areas. The web's problem child has almost caught up to the rest of the class. Sadly, IE8's CSS 3 support is still far behind the curve :(

HTML rendering is actually pretty consistent among standards compliant browsers (Firefox, Safari, Chrome & Opera). The problem is that the largest browser vendor by marketshare (Microsoft) has a poor history of standards compliance; rather they ignore parts of standards for their own proprietary implementations, which change from version to version.

This has caused Microsoft their current position, where it becomes difficult for new versions of their browser to match the quirks and partial standards compliance of the past versions. It's hard to remove features from a browser when a popular site coded years ago is still using them. In essence, they have painted themselves into a corner.

The problem is not in HTML, the problem is the long term effect of proprietary technology instead of standards compliance. Vendor-owned technologies such as Flash or Silverlight are not the answer, in fact they're characteristic of the problem!