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For reviews of particular albums, check out: psytrancereviews

Personal recommendations in this realm:
- Infected Mushroom, Classical Mushroom (full-on sound that addicts many people to psytrance)
- Shpongle, Tales of the Inexpressible (more chill-out, again addicts the mellower crowd)
- Raja Ram's Stash Bag (because it's an excellent collection of contemporary tracks from a variety of artists)
- Space Tribe, Shapeshifter (because it's fun)

we all know macs are crap... here is the proof!

macs
are crap

If play around with these small linuxes on old machines like 386 laptops, you will quickly find that squeezing everything on to the disk space is not the problem, the problem is having enough ram. Most of those distros won't run on two megs of ram because they try to make an initial ram disk bigger than that and thus fail right off the bat. However, small-linux will boot a 386 with 2 megs of ram, so if you want something tiny, it might be a good place to start.

Two-disk Xwindows might do the trick - Or you might even be able to scrounge up some of those old 2.88mb floppy drives.

"...I can set up that system in THREE notes - I mean, disks!"

There it is again.

This one is formatted.

2-Disk Xwindow Linux

Ya see, thats funny, if ya woulda read the parent you would have seen what I was trying to prove.

I appreciate what you were trying to prove, I just disagree with it. It's possible to write bad, buggy and/or dangerous code in pretty much any language. But using a language reasonably well often avoids the pitfalls. In this example, C++ doesn't leave you open to buffer overruns if you choose to use the tools it provides appropriately.

Just out of curiosity, why use "string" over char*?

You might like to read this article on why container classes are usually a better choice than arrays in C++, and the most likely times you'd still want to use a raw array. Much the same arguments could be made for using raw pointers (usually bad) vs. using smart pointers, references or some other mechanism altogether (usually resulting in safer and cleaner code).

BTW, friendly tip: just because a college course tells you something is C++, don't believe it on pure faith. Many college instructors and many books on C++ are very bad and really don't know their subject. Somehow, people wouldn't accept a physics teacher who didn't know about F=ma, but they do accept a C++ teacher who doesn't know that main always returns an int. <sigh> If you want to find genuinely good books on C++ (or C, Java, and various related topics), you might try visiting the Association of C and C++ Users' web site, and looking through their book reviews.

As to your "shrimp to land" argument, I give you this . There are many others, but my time is short.

I know many others may also give you this, but here it is again.

No offense, but I tend to believe in an observable reasoning to our evolution rather than "faith" in an all powerful "being" that "created" us. I would think simple logic would prove evolution as the simpler explanation, and a far less stretch of the two, by far.

Welcome Occam's Razor.

There is far more evidence for evolution than a magical being with time on his hands when concerned with our "creation", so that's where I'll stay. How could God chastise me for following the path of proof?

To start, look at the files in this minimal distribution that runs X:

2-Disk Xwindow Linux

Look at other minimal distributions including the various floppy linuxes and bigger ones like Peanut Linux. Ibiblio's list of distributions is probably the place to start. Look at some of those distributions that come on busincard sized CDs.

So pick one of these that seems configurable and set up a machine with the hardware you have in mind and install it (or boot from the floppies) and start adding to it. First do X, then your rdesktop client, whatever that is. Here's a hint: don't worry about removing compilers, unused libs, etc until you are done. Even then, keep several CDs of the "development edition" around, because you may need all that stuff to add more things in the future.

To get your automatic boot up and start of the client and etc, look at how Mandrake does the automatic log in thing, and simply put all the commands you want to be run in your .xinitrc file, and then have the window manager be the last command. Look at man xinit for details.

The final step would be to trim it down and set it up. My approach here would be to make it a bootable CD like Finnix. In fact, what I would do is start with Finnix, add X and the other stuff, and if I still had space on the CD, stop. Free space on a read-only medium is useless, you might as well put every single thing you think you might need on there until you fill it up.

Some modifications I would make to Finnix would be putting all of the /etc directory in the ram disk, so you could re-configure things on the fly, and if your machine did have a local harddrive, maybe you could use that for swap. Running off a CD means that the user can just turn off the machine when done -- there is no disk to fsck, everytime it starts up it thinks it is the first time, so to speak. I've been playing with modifying finnix, I copied the cd to disk and modified some stuff, and got busy and never burned my new copy to see if it would boot.

But in the long run, you have to realize that you are not going to get someone to do this for you for $150. You might try out DemoLinux and see if it already meets your needs as is -- I would expect that you would need to add that rdesktop thing. You have to either pony up the money, or do it yourself.

Inspite of what some Zealot Hypesters may have told you about Linux being as easy to use as the interface to a coke machine or whatever, you have to come to the realization that Linux is about Freedom. It will always be easier not to be free. Worrying about "is linux ready to meet this bulletized list of requirements" is like worrying whether you might have to walk around a lot and get rained on sometimes and have to get a job if they let you out of prison. If you have any self-respect, it doesn't matter: a free system is the only choice. This means that you have to either put up with not being able to do what you want with computers, or bite the bullet and spend some of your own personal time reading and learning how to install things and configure stuff. Just like you spend your personal time reading the newspaper and going to vote.

If I sound like a dirty gnu hippie Stallman-worshipping fanatic, it's because I am, and I'm proud of it.

Despite what /.'ers have been saying about this particular model, a Linux PDA at this price actually sounds pretty interesting. 320*240 screen res, Motorola processor, non-Windows operating system... it's like Amiga all over again ;)

I still think that PDAs are primarily marketed for business use, though, when there's a huge nerd market waiting to be tapped.

I mean, just looking at the picture of the PDA, it's so obviously a business device - apps shown in the screenshot include Memo, Schedule, and what appears to be a minesweeper clone. When would you ever use something like those on a PDA? I wanna see a USENET reader, a mailer, Telnet, Lynx, perhaps even a text editor and FTP combo so I can write my weblog on the move...

At $89, it's competing with the GBA for my hard-earned cash and Pokémon vs Minesweeper really is no contest...

Despite what /.'ers have been saying about this particular model, a Linux PDA at this price actually sounds pretty interesting. 320*240 screen res, Motorola processor, non-Windows operating system... it's like Amiga all over again ;)

I still think that PDAs are primarily marketed for business use, though, when there's a huge nerd market waiting to be tapped.

I mean, just looking at the picture of the PDA, it's so obviously a business device - apps shown in the screenshot include Memo, Schedule, and what appears to be a minesweeper clone. When would you ever use something like those on a PDA? I wanna see a USENET reader, a mailer, Telnet, Lynx, perhaps even a text editor and FTP combo so I can write my weblog on the move...

At $89, it's competing with the GBA for my hard-earned cash and Pokémon vs Minesweeper really is no contest...

Despite what /.'ers have been saying about this particular model, a Linux PDA at this price actually sounds pretty interesting. 320*240 screen res, Motorola processor, non-Windows operating system... it's like Amiga all over again ;)

I still think that PDAs are primarily marketed for business use, though, when there's a huge nerd market waiting to be tapped.

I mean, just looking at the picture of the PDA, it's so obviously a business device - apps shown in the screenshot include Memo, Schedule, and what appears to be a minesweeper clone. When would you ever use something like those on a PDA? I wanna see a USENET reader, a mailer, Telnet, Lynx, perhaps even a text editor and FTP combo so I can write my weblog on the move...

At $89, it's competing with the GBA for my hard-earned cash and Pokémon vs Minesweeper really is no contest...

And soon Jack Chick will be burning in Hell. Douglas Adams need not worry, God has a divine sense of humor. Jack Chick - This is your death! http://198.182.127.234/~weirdcrap/chick/dtr/dtr.ht ml As for God... well, this is how I view God. http://198.182.127.234/~weirdcrap/chick/judge/judg e.html Jack Chick Parody http://lefty.simplenet.com/chick/ http://198.182.127.234/~weirdcrap/chick/ http://www.fecundity.com/darkdung/ http://www.e-sheep.com/Saturnalia/ Jack Chick Plot Generator http://www.vodex.btinternet.co.uk/chick/ Commentary on Chick http://www.morons.org/chick/gayblade.php3 What Jack Chick REALLY believes http://www.interestingideas.com/ii/chick.htm Jack's Biography (Nutty as Rev. Fred Phelps) http://www.chick.com/information/authors/chick.asp A more balanced biography http://atheism.about.com/religion/atheism/library/ nosearch/printable/blp_aa100799.htm

By the same token, a 1G acceleration will get you halfway in 1.4 days, or all the way in about 3 days

Get the PalmVNC vncviewer to display your X11 stuff.

Recall that the ringworld was in a state of civilizational collapse when it was discovered. The cause? The Puppeteer race was so terrified of the race that created the Ringworld that they launched a nasty space-fungus that devoured the materials of the high-tech devices there. Voila; the downfall of a possibly threatening civilization.

Hmmm...