Seems to be the reason givem by a lot of people who are not moving away from Windows when they want to... "If Photoshop were available on Linux, I'd ditch Windows for good" seems to be a recurring theme.

Its not as if we have RMS on speed-dial.

The fact that the university is known for Computer Science should have no bearing on the Operating Systems used on the terminals of other faculties. As for the Math & CS faculty, they do have Linux terminals

It seems that this time, yours is the ignorant comment. I never suggested that stickers were neat swag, I suggested that you were upset that there wasn't any neat swag -- that stickers were all that there was. Moreover, I fail to see what relevence the CSC's RMS talk has. if Theo de Raadt gave a talk, would you expect the IT department to run around installing a bunch of OpenBSD terminals? All of which is beside the main point, which was that there are Linux labs in the MC, contrary to your claim. From what I've seen, the linux labs aren't usually filled to capacity, so I see no reason why there would need to be more of them, either.

Waterloo also has Linux labs in MC -- thin clients running X sessions with what appears to be a customized version of Kubuntu. I believe that there is also a bare-bones Solaris X session option, too, which sounds like what you are descriping.

IIRC, We (the CSC) asked him to come give a talk. RMS and the FSF are not a corporation trying to woo you with lots of swag, nor, I suspect, do they have the budget to pretend to be. If you went to see RMS talk just to get neat swag, you were there for the wrong reason.

So, I delete a file off of a drive such that the Filesystem no longer holds any references to the given data, and the firmware moves in and performs operations to improve the performance of the device. Its not really rearranging files in to contiguous sections like defragmentation does, its restoring unused sections to an empty state, probably using an algorithm similar to many garbage collectors -- sounds like garbage collection to me.

How big of a price-cut do OEMs get for Windows XP on netbooks again?

I believe the other name to which you refer is the Canadian Reform Aliance Party, or C.R.A.P.

Something about this doesn't smell right.

It's too bad that there is no way to look for the answer on the internet

I was under the impression that canvas tag was going to allow people to create those kinds of whiz-bang interfaces that are currently done in flash.

You're probably a troll, but in case you're simply misguided or poorly informed:

The point of a distro is that it comes bundled with lots of software. It usually does include a browser, an office suite, an image editor, and more.

The purpose of a distribution is to have everything managed by a single group. Sure, most -- if not all -- software comes from upstream, but the same single group does manage all of the packaging and updates for the users of said distribution.

If you really are posting from an Ubuntu machine, then you should know that the updater will update everything installed by default, and everything installed after-the-fact through the package manager. All other things being equal, distributions like Ubuntu should be expected to have more updates than Windows/Office/IE alone.

As a followup, here is the mime-type definition for mp3 found (on Ubuntu) in /usr/share/mime/packages/freedesktop.org.xml, with some language aliases omitted.

<mime-type type="audio/mpeg">
<comment>MP3 audio</comment>
<alias type="audio/x-mp3"/>
<alias type="audio/x-mpeg"/>
<alias type="audio/mp3"/>
<magic priority="50">
<match value="0xfffb" type="big32" offset="0"/>
<match value="ID3" type="string" offset="0"/>
</magic>
<glob pattern="*.mp3"/>
<glob pattern="*.mpga"/>
</mime-type>

So in addition to using file extensions, it also seems to be looking for a header value and a string containingn "ID3" at specific locations. Now if you wanted to write your own mp3 decoder (or modify a FOSS one) that would work properly with these values absent...they'll just find it some other way. Probably better to get something liek TrueCrypt, provided you can not be compelled to reveal the passwords.

I just tried this on Ubuntu, and the file was still recognized (mime-type definitions include more than file extensions in Linux, such as file headers, etc). So if they're booting into a Linux live session, this would presumably fail as an evasive technique.

Not that I disagree with your opinion of this 'author', but I do recall the article from which this quote was taken, and my impression was somewhat different. What I think he is suggesting here is that the genius coder has chosen to write something in an obtuse-yet-better way; this seemingly magical code has since broken due to its over-dependance on a given set of conditions which have since changed, or it has since been maintained by mere mortals who did not grasp the complexity (or simplicity) of the solution -- not that anyone was planting bugs deliberately.

So this is how they will finally get people to buy bottled air?