jcl

A little dissent in the ranks? It wouldn't surprise me if there were people in the company who thought as much of the policy as you do. Maybe they're hoping to use you as leverage to change things. Or maybe they're just sadists

If you have fairly boring hardware you shouldn't have any problems. Bleeding-edge hardware and bargain hardware are what give you trouble, the former because it takes a while for support to appear in Linux and the latter because cheap hardware is often dysfunctional or terminally uninteresting and therefore hard to support (or more accurately, it's hard to find someone willing to support it). A good way to check your hardware for compatibility is to just download something like Knoppix and see if it works. And if Knoppix doesn't work it's quite possible that it's just a quirk of Knoppix. [Ed

IMO BitBangerUSA's right, it's laziness. Employers really want a objective, quantitative measurement of ability. When they discover there isn't one, they panic and start looking for anything objective, regardless of what it may mean. The two obvious places to look are education and certification. The fact that neither may correlate with ability is irrelevant. The important thing is that they let the HR department quickly sort of resumes to prioritize interviews. The existence of the measurement is more important than what it measures. Then the measurement becomes a requirement, and you

Ah yes, the source of a beloved but long obsolete phrase I've had stuck in my head for years. "finger me for my public key" (ObHistory: finger is much older than Linux. It was first implemented on WAITS (or maybe TENEX) in 1971.)

isn't nice either. Maybe you should go back to school and learn some tolerance and curtsy yourself. smart asz school boys aren't the only problem on the G4 boards, intolerable people are the other half. Heh, it's fine, I wouldn't even have noticed if you hadn't mentioned it and I'm not insulted. Catching a little shrapnel when someone touches off a barrage is another one of those things you get used to eventually :-)

The sig is from here. It's harmless. The image server just grabs your IP address and browser's user-agent string, looks up your ISP (or whoever owns the IP), slaps some text on it, and serves the image. You see it all over the place these days. It's popular for the same reason BLINK and popup windows and flash were/are popular. It impresses some people (mostly people who don't realize that all that information is available to everyone) and annoys some people and scares some people. Eventually you get used to seeing it.

Sound like it's toast. Unless just the electronics died and the platters are intact, I'd forget about recovering it. Probably forget about it even then, given the cost of recovery services.

Dead hard drive?

is that in the the step in the manual just before "apply repeated blows with a large hammer." Actually that's not a bad idea. Forcing a boot error might take you into the BIOS utility, or at least delay the boot long enough to get in yourself. A hammer might be a bit much though.

The latter. Hurricane activity, like most weather, is cyclical. There was a period of about 25 years of relative calm starting in 1970, and now we're about ten years into a period of greater activity. In a decade or three it'll calm back down again. The problem is that a lot of these cycles have such long periods that people don't realize they're cyclical. That the periods are often highly variable in length doesn't help either. It turns out that a big chunk of North America is barely habitable at times, the South West because of drought, the South East because of storms. But the cycles

Right. It provides a software environment that is (sort of) compatible with Windows. It doesn't actually emulate any hardware, it just recreates enough of Windows to run applications. Actually, it's supposed to be quite fast. The major problem is that it's a beast to configure.

Try pounding constantly on whatever key takes you to the BIOS from the moment you hit the power switch. Might take a few tries, but you should get in eventually. (Assuming you can get into the BIOS on your machine. Nothing surprises me anymore.)

Self-destructing email comes up every few years. No chance it'll become universal. If the self-destruction trigger hooks into the email client, people will use different clients. If the mail isn't readable with other clients, people won't use the self-destruction feature. If it requires a change to the email platform (e.g., SMTP) it's dead on arrival; no way they're going to be able to convince every MTA to adopt it. The bit about Words documents and whatnot will happen, and limited use of self-destructing email is likely, but DRM is probably too complex for most people to use.

I can't even go two days before it starts to drive me up the wall.

FWIW, when I'm working on the BIOS on my Thinkpad I turn on all the RAM checks and boot diagnostics to delay the boot process at POST. Makes it much easier to get back into the BIOS when you have a 5 or 10 second window while the machine counts its memory. Also makes it's easier to get discs in or out of the CD drive before the machine tries to boot. The normal delay is so short that the tray barely has time to open before it starts to boot.

I know. Like I said, some smart-ass will show up and disagree for no reason. I drew Tuesdays and Thursdays. You've been spending too much time in Linux. BSD has never attached that much importance to the kernel. It's an crucial component of the system, but it's still just one component. Replace it and you still have a BSD, albeit perhaps a different sort of BSD. BSD is similar to GNU in that regard. (Very similar if you consider HURD.) Anyway, there is no BSD kernel as such. The FreeBSD and NetBSD kernels are diverging rapidly, both from 4.4BSD and from each other. And then there's D

FWIW, I recommend that people not follow this part of the standard procedure. It almost invariable causes the files to scattered around /usr/local/, making manual deinstallation extremely difficult. Instead, I recommend using the --path option for the configure script, like so $ ./configure --path=$DIR where $DIR is the directory into which you want to install the files. If you create a new directory for each package, e.g., "/opt/emacs-21.3.1" for Emacs version 21.3.1, you can deinstall by simply deleting the directory. This also allows you maintain multiple versions of the same package (

Actually, I'm an amateur, and I can afford to give my time freely because it has no value :-)

mega pages/hour?? ObShadowrun: Megapulses per hour.

If the whatis database has been built, there's always $ apropos '(1)' I've read some comments indicating that OS X doesn't ship with a whatis database. If not, you can construct one with makewhatis(1), but I don't have the details. (Read the manpage and check in /usr/libexec IIRC.)

Projection keyboards are neat, but the ergonomics bother me. I can't imagine it would be comfortable to pound your fingertips on a random hard surface for hours. The lack of physical keys would probably drive touch-typists nuts too.

Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, and I don't know.

Never had a problem with RPMs or with binary-based systems. There are more important things in life than how you install your software. Like picking lint out of your navel, or watching paint dry. Actually, I was lying :-) Well, not lying exactly, but I do end up fighting most of the systems I use. It's not something I look for in an operating system, but it's not something that drives me away either. Heh, yeah, FreeBSD isn't real big on autoconfiguration. Installing Gentoo is pretty simple if you can turn your brain off. Open the installation guide and let the text go in your eyes and

If you mean the Gentoo machine, then yes, major builds are pretty painful. If you mean the DragonFly machine (it's a laptop, incidentally), you'd be surprised. BSD builds are extremely fast. In part that's because the BSDs discourage optimization, which speeds up GCC considerably, but they also seem to have some kind of BSD magic that makes them far faster than they have any right to be. Indeed, one of the first things I noticed when I switched to Gentoo was how slow the builds were. I was used to cranking out full world rebuilds in the evening under FreeBSD, and all of sudden I was waiting

Gentoo. X11 doesn't build out of the box on DragonFly, and probably won't until X11R6.9 or R7. Even if it did, between the meager memory in the machine (128MiB) and the trouble I've had getting hardware acceleration to work, I won't be running anything complex on it.