This summer I taught a biology course where I dug out an old DOS predator-prey simulation (Sharks!) which ran entirely too fast in a current PC. If I had this, it would have worked better, I think.

Good comment. I was appalled when I learned that that new OO would be called LibreOffice. It looks bad; it sounds bad. You can't tell someone about it orally without having to spell it. But as this thread illustrates, it seems that open source people have this sick need to give their products horrible names.

I'm in the same boat as you. I paid my dues with the more primitive distros, but now I mostly just want to get things done. I have a bunch of partitions and frequently load another distro for fun (Sabayon is the latest), but at some point I come back to Ubuntu because that's where everything works. It's also where the binary versions of programs are usually available first.

Disgusting! Here in the US, only the police allowed to shock and kill with impunity. http://foxyurl.com/qLx

I saw a post on LifeHacker (I think) from a user who installed it on his Eee PC 900.

Back when I was stuck in 24.6land, I learned about ISDN, an ancient "broadband" service. It was slow, but always on, and much better than dialup. Check with your phone company for availability.